Cerbera

Nope, AFAIK it doesn't have anything like that past the functionality in the Timeline where you can show only animated params...
Doesn't exit for Attributes Manager.
 
CBR

My primary advice here is 'build it from the same parts as it is in the real world. So that top section is 4 separate parts, though you can start them all from the same model. You just need to patch that top section in the way that is most helpful to your plans, which is like this initially.
 

 
 
So, as you can see, most of this started with disc primitives, and expanded from there with regular poly tools and techniques.
SDS gets you the curves of course and the box corners / control loops get you the control of them...
 
CBR
 
 

Forget the splines. Do it with a plane and a single bend deformer.
 
You need to say which version of Cinema you are working with for specific instructions on how to do that, but IME you should be able to get fairly close very quickly, and then refine from there...
 

 
Obviously, you will need to make sure your plane has enough even segmentation to bend nicely.
 
Here were my bend settings for the above in R25, but yours will invariably be different - more important is how you transform the bend deformer in relation to the object - it needs to be angled (and moved / scaled) in 2 directions off-planar to get the sort of result you need.
 

 
Also make sure you have keep length ticked or you'll get stretchy paper.
 
CBR

That is enough and I am fairly sure I know what that banding is. I think that's sample distance in visible light tab, which is currently set too high. the lower it goes the longer the render takes, but the less of that banding you get. Here's what it looks like in R25, but should be similar for you back in 17...
 

 
A value of 100 there is almost guaranteed to produce that effect. Should be more like 5 or 10 to start with !
 
I've always thought the default for that control was too high and normally reduce it by a factor of 10 in any scenes I make using volumetric light, especially when the thing that is passing through and interacting with the light is so thin and spidery...
 
CBR

This is the sort of topology I think you could reasonably start with - I made this from 2 helix splines in a loft with Cloth SDS adding some thickness, then made that editable fairly early on, and tweaked the bag into a more organic shape with tools like Iron and soft selection. This sort of thing, being relatively even in poly distribution (albeit slightly denser at the top in the spiral where it needs to be) should provide a good basis for a) simulation tests and b) the actual bag initial shape if you discover that sims are the way to go here...
 

 
I would conduct those sim tests first at this very low poly level, but then again with more and more applied levels of subdivision (so they get included in the sim) until I found the one that a) responds best to sims, and b) gives the best sort of wrinkling on collapse...
 
Note: you will need to apply at least 2 levels of smooth subdivision to get the mesh dense enough to be able to form wrinkles, but the lower levels of subdiv may still be useful to get the initial deformation into a more relaxed organic shape.
 
In the few quick tests I had time for I found that softbody did better than cloth, but cloth wrinkled more convincingly if we only get the whole thing not to collapse ! In the end I went for a just a few frames of cloth sim to get the initial relax, and then binned off the tags, and went softbody after that with some success, but it was becoming clear that this would need  A LOT of experimentation with sim and force settings to get right.
 
Another approach would be to just try and model it without any simulation, which is where the old magnet tool and smoothing deformer trick may come in helpful ! This is expounded upon in great detail by Chris Schmidt here...
 
 
I'm sure some of the techniques he goes over may help you here..
 
CBR

This is interesting - I tried it in R25, and did what I assume you wanted, which is to put the cloner under the main VB setup, and it worked first time without issue !
 

 
Are you doing anything different to me ? 
 

 
CBR

You still haven't said what quality of material you are trying to make - photo-real or something more stylised, but the basis to getting this to work on that model is to use a standard cylindrical projection in conjunction with a Vertical gradient containing the main colours you need.
 
I don't use Cycles so can't advise on the specifics, but that's the mapping type you probably need for this if you are tackling it most simply.
 
 
 

 
But if you find that isn't giving you enough flexibility, then you may need to go in and do a full UV unwrap, and proceed as I suggested originally, something that will be time consuming and tedious given the horribly triangulated and random state of the model.
 
The nicest textured result would ideally require you to retopo this first.
 
CBR

Are you using hair for this ? Cos if you're not, you should be ! 'Cause that sort of look is not possible with texture alone unless the camera is quite some distance from it...
 
Using Hair in cinema is simple when you know how, and what parameters you need, but if you don't know these things then I suggest you search / watch a tutorial or 2 on C4D hair before you start...
 
I would actually use 2 separate hair systems for this - the first to do the thicker, looped strands (lots of curl, not much else) and another one doing the really fine single strands...
 
CBR

You need the HB Modelling bundle, which has the Even distribution script that would sort this in a jiffy. But if you don't have that, then you are out of options I am afraid, and would need to go back to the loft and try and make it give you more even segmentation there.
TBH here you expose the greatest reason not to use Lofts and whatnot for the basis of organic poly models - very difficult to maintain the evenness all the way round a model unless you are using a generator that can accept the Uniform mode of its source splines as the segmentation, which of course a loft cannot...
 
CBR

That is not right; a Null is still called a Null, and you are looking at a Plain Effector there !
There has never been such a thing as a null effector !
 
CBR

Ok, so just to clarify / sum up, to replicate the Blender workflow, we do this..
 

 
...which gives us this... a perfect sphere with no complex poles.
 

 
So Igor, do you agree that gives you everything you need there ?! 🙂
 
CBR

Single rib is certainly one way to go, but I think I'd go for doing it all in one hit on a single cylinder based model. Small selection hit in having to grab every other vertical loop in order to do the extrudes (for that's all they are, and Preserve groups off doesn't help across multiple vertical loops !), but that really didn't take me long...
 

 
Once I had done all the extrudes I thought a bit of Normal Scaling / Ironing was needed to soften it all up a little...
 

 
And then we let SDS do the remainder of the work for us, which of course would make this not a hard surface model at all !!
 
So many ways to skin a fish, but the take home message here is that there is no need to get the splines out !  Even if I needed a lot more definition in the ribs than that I'd still do it with polys and on a single mesh so I saved myself all the faffing about with radial alignment and Connects, which very much interfere with our SDS on / off shortcuts (Q) while modelling ! 😉
 
CBR

OK, here's some additionals...
 
1. The complex pole on your base is OK, and I can see you have solved most of it to radial kite quads, but it is still a complex pole there, so a nicer solve to quads would be something like this...
 

 
2. Even your 'This is how it should look' model has creasing problems around the area where the capsule joins the cylinder, caused by the elongated kite quads and irregular topology there... Cinema's tolerant SDS tries to save you there, but ultimately can't, because there are not enough radial loops in the base shapes to establish your curvature under it, or to allow deviation from them without being compromised.
 
3. Here is what I would call the 'most ideal' SDS answer here, in so far as we accept that the nicest render result is going to come from not using SDS at all and doing this with Hard Surface techniques instead. But regardless, here is what is possible using edge weighting.
 

 
But 2 disadvantages here - firstly this transition here... which is better than in your original, but still not perfection...
 

 
...and secondly, we have had to step up to SDS L4 or even 5 to get that tight a crease using edge weighting, and of course that rather defeats the point of trying to make it low poly, as does SDS in general !!
 
So in summary, and putting aside that you are using this for SDS modelling practice, this form is best achieved without SDS at all, and it should be of equal value to you to know when to use SDS or not as it is to practice doing it !
 
Hope that helps...
 
CBR
 
 
 
 

I'm not seeing any pinching on the shrink-wrapped middle one, specially as you are doing it in a group with the SDS and I would consider your final thickened result fully acceptable also... as you are looking at the SDS result (as opposed to isoparms) these numbers of polys are not problematic. The key to making these sort of things deformation free is based in the amount of radial segments you start with, so if you are unhappy with these, then next stage is to rebuild with double the radials.
 
But this is not a hard surface model, so it's going in the right department !
 
CBR

No, in a subdivision surface context these are fine, and nothing to worry about. indeed it is almost impossible to keep low poly meshes fully planar, especially if the surfaces they are making are curved, and in more than one direction.
 
That function is aiming to prevent 'polygon twist', which can lead to surface problems.
And in hard surface situations, where subdivision is not involved, then polygon twisting is more serious, and can lead to phong shading and render artefact type errors, which is why we sometimes need to find the ones that do it, so that we can try and lessen it to the point where it is no longer problematic.
 
The reason Mesh checker flags them is more for 'completeness' than anything else these days, but there are situations in which it is useful to see which polys are planar, and which are not. In models where there are hundreds of thousands of polys it is sometimes difficult to spot any that have become in advertently 'twisted', and therefore might produce render artefacts.
 
But note there is also a threshold provided, and to usefully check the non-planars that must be set to an angle greater than the maximum amount of twist per polygon you will allow because of the curvature of the object. Typically I will allow up to 10-20 degrees of twist in a low poly base mesh, knowing that by the time that poly is later subdivided, the degree of twist will be orders of magnitude less, to the point where it is largely negligible, because of the increase in poly resolution and the interpolating / smoothing effect of the SDS.
 
In most diagnostic circumstances, it is OK to simply turn off the search for non planar faces, and instead focus on any polys flagged bad, non manifold, and any orphaned points, or unintentional borders that aren't on edges.
 
CBR

You are correct - it is moving it that causes this issue. That is replicable here. I have reported it to Maxon for you, and we must assume it is a bug !
 
CBR

Here we go - this is what I'd do... which won't be the only way, but I would think it is one of the better ones...
 

 
From left to right...
 
1. I got an 8 sided disc, which you would immediately make editable, disconnect and offset half of it, then bridge between to get the rounded divot shape, make quads by dissolving some corner edges. However you would do it , you need to end up with this sort of topology.
2. I selected the right half of the hinge section and rotated it up (in my case 40 degrees). Also achievable with bend deformer.
3. Added some additional inner loops (loop cut) to the divot section, so that it can be more contoured / rounded.
4. Extruded those polys (no caps)
5. Used Phong break selection get me just the top polys of the divot, changed Modelling Axis to Normal, and zero scaled to flatten it off across the hinged bit. This is shown under L2 SDS now.
6. (Optional / lower row, right) I selected all the polys in the divot except the outer ring where it joins the main bar, and ironed them to make them more organic / rounded. You will want to spend more time on this than I did, and maybe consider brush smoothing and perhaps even sliding some loops about to get more precisely the shape you are looking for...
 
Lastly (not shown), and presumably when you have expanded the bar to also incorporate your holes and other details, you would add thickness with regular extrude (caps on)
 
Hope that helps
 
CBR

Welcome to the Core 🙂
 
Please complete your profile to show at minimum which version of the software you are running - we usually need that to be able to answer questions most correctly.
 
Er.. no, if I understand you correctly, that cannot be done natively across multiple objects without plugins because Cinema doesn't have any 'select by direction' tools past phong break selection, which won't work across multiples..
 
Specifically this plugin I think, which is nice and free. I believe that has a select by orientation script.
 
I will add that I don't use this regularly so am not 100% that it does work with multiple objects selected, but I can't see any reason why it wouldn't if all objects are active when it is called...
 
CBR

Collision deformer is almost certainly not the way to go here. That could not even begin to deal with a whole forest of kelp without grinding your system to a halt and cannot work within cloners.
 
You didn't say what your kelp was made from, but one idea might be to make it using hair and instanced geometry, That is relatively faster to calculate with a hair collider placed on the shark object for example, but you many run into issues with collisions failing if the kelp geo differs significantly from the hair driving it. It also has the advantage of being anchored at the base by default.
 
Otherwise you could also try regular dynamic collision, using dynamic connectors to anchor your kelp to the floor. That works with cloners !
 
Yet another plan would be to use cloth, and cloth colliders - that can be anchored via fix points, and if you turn gravity off, or make it positive, and use a turbulence or wind force you may be able to get some decent underwater movement into it as well.
 
CBR

Well, spline wrap is what immediately springs to mind, but that would require your tank track to be flat to start with, which is probably more editing than you  want to do... but TBH I am struggling to think of another way. Perhaps our resident animation guys can suggest something...
 
CBR

Not through a tag, no. Usually, this is a terrible idea anyway because it invariably creates ngons, and coplanar edges, which of course affect SDS surfaces rather negatively in the wrong circumstances...
 
There was an older mode of OpenSubDiv that did allow variable tesselation, but that didn't work with tags either, and that whole mode has been removed from Cinema since...
 
So, I think we would have to do this manually with selections and the subdivide command, unless anyone can think of a way to do it with fields, which alas I don't have time to experiment with today ! 🙂
 
CBR
 

No, it sounds like you're basically doing that wrong, but hard to confirm exactly what the issue is until you upload the scene file.
 
My own expertise is more in modelling, but generally speaking, as I understand it, the camera scaling should remain at 1,1,1 and you should change your render output settings to match the perspective / dimensions you want in your final image, then frame the scene using the camera lens controls in the object tab to set aspect ratio / focal length / sensor size etc. 
 
Use the Safe Frames feature to see in viewport what area will be rendered. Also make sure you are actually rendering through the correct camera !
 
CBR

No. Fields themselves are not in R18, full stop ! They came in at R20. You can get a random selection in versions earlier than that using plugin Selections suppletives from Code Vonc.
 
CBR

The answer is right there in the help ! Hair mode auto-switches to hair as guides when you use the add guides tool. Switch that back to polygon area to fix.
 
CBR

Yep, you are issuing contrary instructions to Cinema:
 
1. You tell a parametric object to animate its Y position...
2. You then put that in a cloner, which tells it's Y position it is now fixed.
 
So just untick 'reset coordinates' in the cloner, and that should be fine...
 
CBR