Cerbera

Courtesy of Silverwing VFX, I think this might help with Octane / mograph colours... CBR

You can hold ALT as you drag the sliders to radically slow them down ? CBR

I hope you are not inferring what was not implied ! I cough only in reference to the surprising obviousness at you not mentioning liquids as being an area still missing ! CBR

*cough* liquid sim ?? That's one big area we are still 'missing'... CBR

The OM is arguably one of Cinema's greatest strengths, and its userbase are rather attached to it, not to mention, used to it, so I think it makes sense to introduce such a powerful new system via an innately familiar interface, and using its workflows and structures. I like having all the particle stuff there in the OM where I can always see it and (mostly) what it is doing without having extra windows floating about. That's not to say I couldn't also see it working in a nodal context, but I have to say I kinda like it where it is... CBR

It's a wonderful release, adding a boatload of functionality to simulation and a solid first step to bringing our particles up to date, and fully integrated with other simulation components - as Chris was at pains to point out the possibilities now are mind-boggling ! I think a lot of people will be very happy with this release, except possibly the guys who make X-Particles; it will be interesting to see where they pivot next. Of course all the attention is rightly focused mainly on the particles, but I was pleased that there have been good updates in other areas, a few of my own suggestions have been added to modelling functionality, and RS got a lot of love and improvements, not least being the toon shader stuff. The new Connectors functionality and workflows are so much easier to work with than the old system, so that is very welcome too. So all in all, I am loving this release... CBR

This can also happen when there is no physical thickness on the label. Adding a tiny amount will usually resolve this as well. CBR

In a lot of ways I agree with @bezo who questions if lofts are the best thing to use for this. TBH it is quite an unconventional use of a loft in the first place ! Ordinarily I would say it's not ideal, but I am aware there may be perfectly valid reasons why you might need it to be splines, or procedural etc etc... But we can still apply polygon rules when using splines, and if we want certain areas curved and others very sharp, then we just need to make our splines do the right thing, which in your case would be this... So straight bits get no intermediate points, curves get evenly distributed ones, and sharp corners get control points either side of the corner. But of course that is quite difficult (and perhaps impossible without recourse to nodal spline creation) to get procedurally. Which is a shame, because under an Extrude I'm fairly sure a manual spline like, with default interpolation that is giving you exactly the shape you need, and if you don't need to care about cap topology because it's flat, then that alone might be enough ? CBR

It's not my area of specialisation, but I watch developments with interest. I think most people still consider Maya the ultimate for rigging, but I don't think Cinema is doing too badly in that department either. We recently improved quite a lot about weights and symmetry workflows, and before that Character Object and C-Motion were good leaps forward in setting up these things quite quickly without a great deal of in-depth knowledge... I found Noseman's recent 4 hour rigging series on the Maxon training team's YT channel particularly helpful in understanding all the rigging basics and possibilities open to us, so maybe it would help you catch up too... Or for even more detail, and a better focus on character rather than than machine riggings, there was this excellent (and exhaustively thorough) series that preceded it. CBR

For me, reversing the point order on just the segments where it is wrong works every time... Here's an inexplicably screwed one... Yet if I reverse the point order in the lower segment then voila... I can't tell you why it happens tho - that remains utterly baffling ! In the first example above we can see the spline direction is the same for both segments, so why the cloner does that with it remains a mystery to me. For me, instancing that fixed spline preserves the correction (instanced version on right there), so you would need to upload a scene file which will show us what might be different in your setup vs mine... CBR

Not that I am aware of - I guess that sort of functionality has been made somewhat less needed because of the Placement / Dynamic Placement tools, which although not letting you draw stuff directly on objects, does at least allow you to put them there after creation. Edit: Oh yeah - scatter ! CBR

I thought HUD is part of layout isn't it ? So if you save yours as one of those it can be loaded at any time into any file, right ? CBR

Hmmm. No. Is working over here. Maybe do a support ticket about that ? Command is c4d.CallCommand(1036224) # CBR

No no, in fact I'd say FBX was superior to OBJ in every way, except possibly wider compatibility with really old software !

I think the more apposite question might be 'Why is OBJ so much more inefficient than every other format?' !! It's true OBJ files can be huge. I don't know specifically why this is, but feel sure it must have something to do with 'legacy', given that OBJ is a very old and 'first gen' format that should have been retired a while back, but (presumably) for backwards compatibility and 'library' reasons, hasn't been. CBR

Need more infromation, and the scene file. Is this Bullet dynamics or new Rigid Body sim ? CBR

I will get round to testing this myself - just having a mad busy week that has stopped me getting to it so far. I think there have been some changes / upgrades / tweaks in the sim system between the 2 versions you mention, which may explain this change. CBR

It would help to know which versions of both Cinema and Octane you were using... Have you tried baking to Alembic ? CBR

We only need to eliminate ngons (leaving quads and tris), which we do by checking for stray ones in points mode, and ctrl-sliding those into neighbouring points. We can let triangles pass here because SDS will turn them into quads for us. Here, I fixed yours... JAEE pickball wrap 01 fixed.c4d Only modelling purists like me would feel the need to chase all quads in the base mesh. CBR

Were we to want to model the holes, we can do so fairly painlessly by applying our SDS to the mesh by CStO, and then doing Pattern select to get us staggered groups of 4 polys to inset, fit circle and delete, which gives us this sort of thing, under Thicken... I just did a small section to show you how that stands up to close detail... CBR

Change Extrude direction to Y. CBR

Now, in Stage 3 we were needing to move the points into the shape general shape of the handle. Presuming the bat is facing down Z, the current orientation of our spiral is not optimal (left, viewed from above). By rotating the object 22.5 degrees on H (360/(8/2)) in the coordinates manager we can sort that out in one easy hit, which we should follow by enabling Axis mode, and resetting it to 0, thus preserving our previous axis position, which will continue to be helpful where it is (right). Using this view we can easily select groups of vertical points in pairs and move them to get the correct handle profile, thusly... where we can then select these edges (being careful to exclude any that comprise any quad solves at the ends), and bevel them... If you bevel with 0 segments you can keep the corners quite subtle. ...which means they will hold their shape under SDS, but relatively gently... like that... Now just need to get an FFD under it to match the dimensions we are still missing in our reference. Lots of Y segments here isolates just the areas we want to affect. ...and that way we get our flares top and bottom (XZ only again, and don't forget Z, which you need to angle in at the top from side view as well), and we're pretty much done, apart from adding small thickness, which we can do procedurally using thicken, or manually using extrude (with caps and up to 3 depth segments). CBR

Quick sidestep to show you ideal bat topo... CBR

Ok, here's a closer look at stage 2 where we have just made our overlapping extrude editable... and then on the right, once we have added loops top and bottom and at 50%, which helps with SDS tightening later. The entire bottom and top loops get scaled in on XZ (presuming Y is up) with subtly different amounts, and we use the Remove A / B option in Plane Cut to decapitate it flat at both ends... Solving that to quads at the ends can be done a number of ways, all of which are quite hard to put into words, so I'll show you a closeup of what I did at the top for example... we don't actually have to be this tidy (will be covered in black wrap) but it's nice if we are... This gives us the following SDS result, which is looking fairly decent, but of course remains cylindrical so far, so we need to sort that out next... CBR

If you need assistance at that level of detail you may be waiting a while I'm afraid - quite a heavy workload at the moment, and those sort of posts take hours to compose. However I have built it (to proof-of-concept level), and so can give you edited highlights now... There are about 4 principal stages, thusly... 1. Helix spline in Extrude, but with very specific settings. In the helix the number of points is 8 x number of complete rotations. The end angle is -360 x number of rotations. Do 1 more spirals at each end than you need (I did 8 total), as you will be slicing this flat at both ends later. There should be zero spline interpolation, so that each full turn contains no more than 8 points in the resulting geometry. The Extrude should also have no (depth) segments initially, but should be deep enough to overlap itself by about an 1/8th of the depth of each band. 2. At this point we need to take an editable polygon copy of that via CStO, so we can edit and add loops to it. We need to add loops using Loop Cut (K,L) to both top and bottom of the spiral, so that the border edges can be scaled in on XZ to fix the overlaps and tuck the wrap under itself nicely. A further loop can be added to define the narrow darker strip at the bottom of each wrap at this point. 3. In the next group of steps we need to re-orient the model (but not its axis) by 22.5 degrees on H, top and tail it to flat, non-spiral borders at both ends using Plane Cut (K,J), solve the ends to quads and scale groups of edges apart to better match the elongated shape, before selecting the edges and bevelling them to gain additional support loops there, and harder creases on the corners. 4. Last stage is FFDing that with a great many Y segments so you can match XZ curvature around the handle from top to bottom of it... I will pop back to add further detail as time permits this week... CBR