Cerbera

The alembic file is not in that scene, so impossible to check it specifically. But yes, I think that is doable. The time parameter offsets keyframes on clones so in order to give the cloner control over that you'll be needing to turn off animation on the alembic and then key the frame parameter. Then I think the time offset from the effectors can affect / offset those keyframes. CBR

I also tried Auto-packed UVs but was less impressed than @MighT was - it gave me a result that was full of small islands, and would have been a seaming nightmare. Much better results if I did manual seams and UV Unwrap, but some relax errors due to mesh problems. CBR

Yes. Unlike the boolean object the Text Object contains addressable selections including the inbuilt chamfering. CBR

You need to apply the bevel deformer by collapsing the parent null down to an editable object, which you can do by selecting it, right clicking it in the Object Manager and choosing 'Current State to Object'. Then you can make or update your selection tags to include the bevel polys as well. CBR

There are no licensing limitations other than that you are not allowed to use Student Editions for Commercial Work. There is no issue with opening files between commercial and student licenses. But UV unwrapping that is likely to take around an hour or 2 on a mesh of that extreme density and lack of character edge flow, so we might be in the territory of proper paid job rather than small tip ! Please PM me if you would like that done. But UVs do not affect hair placement at all, and your texture, from what I can see of it (not provided with file) seems very low res / non photographic / basically just a coloured noise, and a lot of the animal is covered in hair anyway (apart from the horns) so you can probably get away with using a Standard Projection like Cubic for example instead of UV unwrapping. Definitely worth a try first I would say... to do that simply change the setting in the material tag from UV Mapping to Cubic, then r-click it and do 'fit to object'. Interestingly if we follow the advice I gave you in the last thread about this, and change the main hair distribution from Vertex to Polygon Area, and regrow it, and choose some more appropriate settings in the hair object and material, then we can get that hair applied evenly everywhere, EXCEPT where there are polygon errors in the mesh, which cause bald spots because the hair grows unpredictably due to intersecting polygons. And that looks half decent, even when well-lit like below... ...but it does illustrate the evenness. CBR

Move the object you are tracing down until it is under the default point level ? Or what I do sometimes is trace the object just outside its boundary where you can see, then scale them all in from centre once done, and you can move the whole spline object above the reference to make fine adjustments. Another way round it would be to use poly snapping, and then you should be able to click directly on the thing you are tracing, and points should appear on its surface. Yet another way would be to begin your spline from a suitable spline primitive, which you can manually place above the reference before you make it editable and adjust points. CBR

Totally understand - thank you 🙂 CBR

A yes - crossing the 'Winbush bridge' to Unreal land 🙂 And of course let's not forget our own redoubtable Captain @Igor is a very good man to go to for starter Houdini tuts. CBR

It's a fair point, but also a self-answering one if we think about it a bit more... You are lucky today it would seem that your animation does cache quickly, but would you seriously be prepared to accept a 6 second delay every time you pressed play ?! Perhaps you would if you knew it would only be the first time, but of course if you change anything about the settings then the cache would need to be rebuilt. Now, imagine you are not lucky, and your dynamics take 5 minutes to cache ! That's gonna drive you mental waiting for that every time you press play, and have made a tiny change somewhere... So, that, I am guessing, is why they don't do that ! But I do note we are starting to see improvements along those lines in the areas where it is more possible - most notable example being the Volume builder, which now has cache layers. CBR

What is a 'fructured sculpt' ? Do you mean 'Fractured', and if so, how do you mean ? - there is only a sculpt object in your file... If you wish to export that you will need to get an editable copy of it without a sculpt tag - that is not transferable to any other software intact. You can do that by selecting the sculpt mesh, and doing 'Current State to Object' from the r-click menu. CBR

That's lookin' pretty decent to me ! 🙂 Would love to see your file with that working... CBR

No, it's not polygon density that causes the issue with that, it's actually a very light mesh, poly-wise; I suspect it's the fact that it all has real world thickness, and dynamics hates that sort of thing. Also I think it would be quite tricky to balance which parts of the mesh are influenced by the joints, and which are controlled by any dynamics. Likewise, the thickness of the canopy pretty much rules out collision deformer as well (certainly in my brief tests). I was going to suggest Posemorph as well, but as it's not really my wheel-house I am not sure of how best to set that up in this context, and what to do with priorities... CBR

You will find that sometimes you don't need boundary mode to select the outlines of holes - it depends on what the topology is doing. If for example a hole is surrounded by a continuous undiverted edge loop (inset cornering) then U,L will pick it up regardless, whereas if that isn't the case you need that boundary mode of U,L to get it. There are some other ways to do it as well. Mesh Checker allows you to select all boundary edges in a single click, and (R23 onwards) Outline Selection (U,Q) let's you move your mouse over existing poly selections / parts of the mesh to select boundary loops individually or all of them at once by clicking off-mesh. CBR

We are utterly powerless to solve that issue until you provide the step file ! We also need to know what it was originally exported from, and if you still have access to that app, and very importantly, which version of Cinema you have, which should be in your profile please.... CBR

Tipping sends a thank you directly to the person that helped. Contributions help with overall Core expenses. CBR

Change it to a Radial field ? radial field CBR.c4d CBR

er... I think we'll find it does !! CBR

Yep, that should be doable, using either alpha or transparency on the plane. So sphere gets the composting tag. If you make the plane fully transparent then you can untick 'seen by refraction' in the compositing tag and that should do it. If you make the plane fully alpha-hidden then you can untick 'seen by transparency' for much the same sort of result. In this example, interactive render region shows an alpha-black plane parked in front of a sphere (composting tag as above) and a cube (no tag) behind it. CBR

Welcome to the Core 🙂 That is Subsurface Scattering, possibly combined with partial transparency. But that is all I can tell you until you complete your profile, which tells us the essential information we need with questions like these such as which version of Cinema are you working in, and what renderer are you using ?! CBR

You can report bugs via the Maxon website / support ticket system. I'd report it for you if I understood what you meant by 'default motion layer'. Can you elaborate , and explain what you expect to happen ? Also if we do report it, we'll be needing that scene file to demo the issue, so pls upload it here if you don't send it to Maxon yourself. CBR

Please complete your profile before asking questions so we know which version you are working with. Have you searched the site ? This question was asked (and answered I think) a few weeks ago. CBR

3 buttons at once CBR

'Single-threaded' ? You can try hitting Esc once, and waiting. That SHOULD halt ongoing processes, but doesn't always in practice. In that case it's wait or force quit time (shift+shift+delete), which will attempt a save before it goes. CBR

No, you may be confused there. Caching is either something we do to simulations to make them go faster the in the viewport, or to make dynamics work with team rendering for example, or something we used to do in Standard Render with GI, which could save some time in some circumstances where only camera animation was involved. Unless there is some caching functionality in RS I am not aware of... CBR

...and you've got such lovely hair 🙂 CBR