- Your desktop at work.
- Your desktop at home.
- Your laptop.
Add to this that on any of these machines you may be running the current version of Cinema and the version or two before that (for legacy projects/clients), and you've pretty much guaranteed that any time-saving scripts, plugins, layouts, or libraries won't be where you need them when you need them.
Thankfully, there's a solution, that would probably have been obvious to any hardcore unix hacker (which I'm not, nor I assume are you): symbolic links.
A symbolic link is basically a shortcut from one folder or file to another, except that your file browser and any programs you're running can treat them like real files.
The basic solution works like this.
The three lower arrows each represent a symbolic link to a "C4DLibrary" folder in your DropBox (or GoogleDrive, or iCloud, etc) account. Dropbox will handle the work of keeping your files synced across computers, and whenever you add a new plugin/layout, etc, it will get saved to the C4DLibrary folder in your dropbox.
Instructions
Note: the following instructions apply only to a Windows machine. These instructions also should only be used with the same version number of C4D, cross-version linking can lead to strange results - you'll need to manually link sub-folders.
- In Dropbox create a folder called "C4DSync" (This is the "C4D Library" folder from the above illustration)
- Download "Directory Linker" from: http://dirlinker.codeplex.com/
- Open Cinema 4D on the most readily accessible computer.
- Click on Edit->Preferences
- From the preferences window click on the "Open Preferences Folder" button. This will open a windows explorer dialog.
- In the path bar at the top (the one that looks like Username->AppData->Roaming->MAXON->...), click to the far right. This will convert the path to a file path that should look something like:
C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\MAXON\CINEMA 4D R13 - Copy this text.
- Run the "Directory Linker" application you downloaded earlier.
- In the "Link Location:" field paste the filepath you copied in step 6.
- In the "Link To:" field browse to the "C4DSync" directory you created in dropbox. It'll probably look something like "C:\Users\Username\Dropbox\Library\C4DSync"
- Ensure that "Copy contents to target then delete it" is active.
- Click on the Go! button.
Congratulations, your primary installation of Cinema 4D is now saving all preferences and plugins to your dropbox folder. Now just repeat steps 2-12 for all other C4D installations.
WARNING: Please make backups of your preferences folders before doing this, especially if you have any important projects in there. I've yet to test this with C4D running simultaneously in multiple locations, but I can imagine that leading to some bad juju, so please test (and report back) before using this in production. Also, if your plugins are serial-linked this will lead to some issues as well unless all versions of C4D are sharing the same serial number.
References
Thanks go to the following resources for getting me to a place where I was able to write this post:
