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Activity Forums Maxon Cinema 4D Units and scale

  • Units and scale

    Posted by Miem Chan on March 23, 2006 at 8:29 am

    C4D has a Units option in Edit/Preferences. I can chance the unit from this option BUT if I understand correctly, models are saved without the physical units.

    Assume that we
    * Set my C4D unit into “cm”
    * Create 2cm cube object and save it into a file “2cmCube.c4d”

    * Set my C4D unit into “m”
    * Create 2m cube object and save it into a file “2mCube.c4d”

    Now if we merge these two objects in a new scene with “km” as its unit, then both the 2cmCube and 2mCube look the same size. To make 2cmCube as 2cm in my new scene I need to chance its scale to 0.000001 (2 cm = 2e-05 km) but C4D does support scale value upto 0.001(Yes, it is very unlikely to have two different objects in the same scene of that diverse sizes. I’m trying to learn how/if real physical units can be used in C4D)

    My questions are;
    * Is it normal practice for C4D (or other modelling/animation products) not to have physical units for the 3d objects?

    * Is there a way in C4D chance the scale factor lower than 0.001?

    Thanks

    Miem Chan

    Brian Jones replied 12 years, 7 months ago 4 Members · 3 Replies
  • 3 Replies
  • Adam Trachtenberg

    March 24, 2006 at 3:32 am

    As you surmised Cinema doesn’t have real-world units. This is fairly common in non-CAD 3D software.

  • Jessica Ma

    September 21, 2013 at 4:39 pm

    It c4d doesn’t have physical size – how does it calculate dynamics?

  • Brian Jones

    September 21, 2013 at 9:08 pm

    7 years ago it was true – C4D had units but you chose them at the start of the project and if you changed units all it did was change the unit not the number, no unit conversion was done. If you had a sphere 10 inches in diameter and changed units to centimetres the sphere was then 10 centimetres in diameter. Not a real world conversion to 25.4 centimetres. C4D has had real world conversion of units for a while now so it’s no longer true. However, either way dynamics were and are always possible because there were still units and it just does the dynamics math with whatever unit is being used, it doesn’t really matter if they are ‘real world’ or not since they can’t change during render time.

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