XLinky is a very simple, but useful free little XREF plugin for Cinema 4D that I've written in order to speed up my workflow and minimize space needed ofr certain projects. It's provided as is, with no guarantees that it will work/not work in any given situation, and are not responsible for any problems, issues or loss of data that may occur through it's use.
How to use XLinky! A quick walkthrough.
Start out with an object that for whatever reason you need to bake out (for isntance a metaballs object is often a good one as they take some time to calculate normally).
Select the object
Then from the plugins menu choose either "Bake Mesh Animation To XREFS" or "Bake Mesh Single XREF",
Bake Mesh Animation To XREFS will make a sequence of files one for each frame of the document for the currently selected obejct, Bake Mesh Single XREF will jsut bake the currently selected object's current frame to a single file, with Animation be sure that when you save them you don't append a number at the end as they will use the end number to determine the correct frame when you import the sequence back in! It's best if you put them into their own folder in this situation
When done you will have a nice folder of one file for each frame (this can take up quite a lot of space, depending on the density of the mesh in question, and several minutes to do depending on how complex the mesh being baked is, ti will take the rendertime settings for the mesh when baking).
Next into the scene you want to use your XREFs in, add a new XLinky Instance object
In the attributes manager you'll see you have a file name that needs filling,
If you want to import the sequence, then select the first file in teh sequence thus:
Now you can animate the "Time" value in the reference file (if you have a sequence) and it will update from teh referenced files as you go!
And you will end up in viewport with an instance of a nice high resolution mesh that didn't need all that nasty heavy calculation going on with it!
Final pointers:
Don't add materials etc to your original mash. They dont' import in this version, and they'll stop materials you add to the XSlinky Reference object from working.
Enjoy!