Cerbera

If we're going to do it nicely / properly, a cassette tape is actually quite hard to model in any software, but none of it is unsurmountable if you have good reference and plan your parts, corner types (box vs inset type) and topology carefully.
If you can get away with not modelling the inside (ie your cassette isn't clear material) then the outside is a lot easier than the inside, as your second reference shows...
 
You would begin this model by outlining the holes and tape guide section, and connecting those meshes together across what is (helpfully) a mostly flat surface, which means you can do any loop expansion / collapsing on flat bits, without worrying about SDS lumpiness on curvature. In that respect it is not strictly necessary to exclude tris or ngons in these areas, but in practicality it makes little sense, and saves little time to do so.
 
The front half of the case is notably simpler than the rear half, which contains all the extruded parts. It's not as much work as you'd think though, because we can deploy X-symmetry throughout, and all the parts that are chiral are best achieved with separate meshes...
 
But really your first reference photo is showing you all the prime topology points you have to hit to make that inside, which mainly consists of ensuring you have enough topology to describe the hard edged inner details at the bottom, which then collapses down to less dense poly flow as they get further up where detail is less. Hence the liberal use of kite quads for loop concatenation as we see particularly in the section below...
 

 
Note the box cornering that goes on everywhere there is a hard defined corner, which is required to stop this collapsing under SDS.
 
Of course there are a number of lazier, cheat-ier ways to make the modelling easier (booles, volume builder, non SDS etc) but none of those will give you quite as nice results as if you model it poly by poly, SDS, where you have infinite resolution suitable for extreme close-ups. But if this cassette is just lying on a table somewhere at the back of a scene, then a full SDS model is probably overkill.
 
CBR
 

I'd go Boole then ReMesher - perfect job, lovely topo. And then you could put that under Thicken or Cloth Surface then SDS, and you're done...
 

 
CBR
 
 

Here is a comparison of 3 of the available mapping methods.
 

 
  
 
As we can see the cubic terraced islands approach produces by far the least distortion. The not inconsiderable distortion we inevitably get from any version of the UV peeler method is quite extreme if you do the outer and inner as just the single island, even in the conformal relaxed version (image C above) so by doing a cubic approach we spread that distortion out across the 4 areas we allow to remain separate, which lessens it accordingly. The price we pay for this is 4 partial seams per island*
 
* You may notice that in A, the Cubic version I added a lot more seams than that along the base end to achieve zero distortion in that area, knowing that we probably won't see any seam lines down there...
 
Note in the main top pic how the squares stay the same size at the bottom of the bottle all the way to the top, whereas the UV peeled ones can help but shrink those polys the higher up the bottle we go, which is why solution A is better, albeit non-intuitively so.
 
Make sense ?
 
CBR

Ok, well that'll be why it didn't work then - you don't have new unified rope dynamics...
But I have modified the scene, and adjusted force values to use the original rope solver, which might make this work with versions before R25.
 
Give this one a go and let me know if it works. I can't test it in R21 myself as I don't have it installed anymore...
 
CBR
spline swing legacy solver CBR.c4d

You can either or apply 1, some or all levels of the subdivision and UV the resulting mesh, OR do the more common, and often simpler thing, which is to UV the base mesh. 
 
The SDS object has UV subdivide modes (edge / border etc) that should result in practically no distortion* if your base meshes overall shape roughly matches the SDS result. However, in cases where you are working really VERY low poly, and relying mostly on SDS to generate the primary silhouette / form of your mesh then it is sensible to apply a couple of levels of that subdivision to the mesh before you UV it to minimize the SDS distortion that would probably result otherwise.
 
CBR
 
* This does not apply to OpenSubDiv, which has a long-standing bug I report every year, meaning that it is simply impossible to get SDS distortion-free mapping with that mode of SDS, so make sure you stick to Catmull Clark !

Please update your profile to show which software and which renderer you are using. For example I have downloaded 45 MB only to find out that you are using Vray, which I don't have, and therefore can't help you with...
 
CBR

Yep, delete the Normal Tag first, then set the phong tag threshold quite low. That should sort it. If not, we'll be needing an example file to test on.
 
CBR

I have one monitor connected via HDMI and another connected via display port - as far as I can tell there is no visible difference between them. Cinema can use either one, or both without issue.
 
CBR

Smoothing deformer does not apply to splines.
 
Instead, in the Tracer settings, change the type from Linear to something else, and then add some intermediate points value greater than 1 to allow curvature.
 

 
CBR

Seems like a reasonable way to go. In my version I am holding all the 'fruit' in a dynamic collider box (static mesh) and using a moderate strength wind with some turbulence to float them all up to start with. However, before they reach the top of the containing box a linear field attenuates the wind, making them fall languorously yet chaotically back down, depending on what you do with wind strength...
 
By keyframing that strength you should be able to either fade off the wind, or turn it off abruptly, making them all fully susceptible to gravity again quite quickly.
 

 
tossing fruit.c4d
 
CBR
 

I suspect that is actually a very simple setup. A Cloner is cloning a null, which looks like it's being animated via a random effector in Noise or Gaussian Mode. A MoGraph Tracer (unclear which mode, though I suspect 'connect all nodes') then presumably takes the output null(s) from that, generates connecting splines between them and feeds that to the Volume Builder where dilate / erode and SDF Smooth are used to thicken and smooth the animating spline into the sort of shape you see above. The disadvantage to that sort of setup is that the movement is not very art directable, based, as it seems to be, on random movement where the only control we have is animation speed and position parameter being randomised. Of course that would be circumnavigable by just manually keying the animation of nulls yourself....
 
Here's a quick starter file in which you can change cloner numbers / modes and play with volume builder effects...
 
VB Tracer.c4d
 
CBR
 
 

A quad patch, in this context, means any UV island that contains 4 sided UV polys in a simple grid formation - a plane object would be the most obvious example of an island that can be rectangularized, whereas a round disc comprised of triangles is not a quad patch, and cannot be forced into rectangular form for obvious reasons, which is why that command is conditional.
 
 
Yes of course; you can put seams wherever you like, but you do so by defining the new ones as edge selections and re-projecting the UVs according to them.
 
In a way, asking 'how do I move a seam?' requires an entire explanation of the concepts and workflows of UV mapping, and that info already exists, so my best advice would be to watch any of the many hundred UV tutorials about it over on Youtube. This one particularly taught me everything I needed to know about UVs back in the day, and although some stuff has changed since in Cinema, the general principles still apply.
 
Hope that helps
 
CBR

Yes, it'll be the UV causing that, upon which the surface deformer depends utterly. yours is broken into islands, which is no good for this...
 
This what the UV should look like for the cylinder, and the settings you need to wrap using it...
 

 
To get that UV looking like that I was in UV Edit mode, selected all polys, lined the viewport up so I was vaguely front on to most of it, did Frontal Projection, then relaxed all polys, which should get you the shape above, which you can then scale to fit the canvas better. You may need to pop to UV commands to mirror U or V so my specific deformer settings work...
 
CBR

Interesting glass, in that it combines features normally found in isolation on these things.
Displacement is certainly the way to go here to get the diagonal ridges and the tiny diamonds, but we should pretty much model the rest of it. We could model the tiny diamonds as well quite easily, so may come back to that.
 
2 primary techniques involved here: 
 
1. Producing a band of diamond flow polys, which is done with very specific segmentation and bevelling points to their 'limits' before optimizing and insetting / normal Moving, or by simply bevelling polys (groups off).  2 stages of that shown below... started with a cylinder, 24 radials, 2 depth segments, no caps, which gives us the pattern we are looking for*.
 

 
2. Extruding straight form perimeter loops from that, and smooth subdividing (just) them starts the smooth round sections above and below, where we need to transition the even edges into grouped ones capable of holding those ultra thin edges, and indented arch profiles. And that's why we chose 24 radial segments initially so that we have number that when subdivided gives us 48, from which we will make 12 radial arches...
 

 
* I am basing this on the number of arches / facets, which I reckon is probably 12. YMMV !
 
Next we don't want to be making 12 arches, so we'll make half of one instead, and use radial symmetry to get the rest, meaning we'll be needing 12 symmetry segs, allowing us 4 polygons per arch, only 2 of which we need to edit thanks to mirror within the radial symmetry. Now, as the ridges where the arches meet are so damn sharp, we need special topology to deal with that unless we want to cheat and do it with edge weighting. I'll pop back and show you what that is after dinner...
 
Hopefully that fires you off in the right direction though...
 
CBR
 
 
 
 

R-click the material tag in question and choose generate UV coordinates. That should hammer down whatever that tag is doing into a new UV map.
 
CBR

OK, well the end of a pencil is not actually a point, which very much helps us here, because we can just bevel the point you have to turn it into a flat disc you can angle rakishly, or leave straight as I have done here, and patch to quads...
 

 
Then we just need perimeter control loops to isolate that from the nib loops to avoid the distortion there. As you can see it still looks like a point at the wider scale...
 

 
Check for red lines shown up by Mesh Checker in your version. There are a couple of edge points around the place.
 
CBR

It will not 😉
 
But you can assign a video to a material, which you can apply to a plane, and have that play back with the timeline. This also has the advantage of working in perspective view, and can be easily offset behind your models.
 
CBR

Ah Ok, you have the wrong thing selected - the object, not the FFD. Select the FFD and then the points you want to change within that rather than directly on the model as you are doing now...
 
However, even when you have the right points selected, the axis will still not be in the centre, because you have previously moved it elsewhere using the modelling axis attributes, which are currently like so...
 

 
Reset X, Y and Z to 0 (by right clicking the spinners - the little arrows that appear when you hover over the value) and you'll be scaling from centre again.
 
CBR

The stiffness is primarily governed by number of segments in surface - generally speaking, the thicker and stiffer you want something to be the less segments you want in it. A default size Plane object, given 40 x 40 segments and a bendiness value of 0 and a thickness of 1.5 behaves quite like thick leather for me. Whereas if I up the segment count to 200 x 200, and up bendyness to 100, and reduce thickness I get a much thinner-looking material with correspondingly more folds, and floppier movement.
 
Here's an example scene which shows the difference. I left the planes parametric so you can experiment with different segments.
 
Cloth thickness vs segments.c4d
 

 
CBR

Wouldn't you just clone a thin cylinder onto a spline ?
 

 
CBR

If files suddenly go missing that is possibly early indication of imminent HDD failure. I would test all system drives.
If that seems fine, we gotta think what else could have caused that to go missing, and presumably may have to reinstall to fix it.
You should at least mention which version this is...
 
CBR

Nope, that is working entirely correctly for me. 2 things to bear in mind.
 
1. Axis Centre Dialogue is moving the OBJECT axis, not the modelling one.
2. You are not changing the alignment at all with your current settings - only object axis position, which is working correctly. And it works properly for me if I turn alignment on and set it to Z/ Normal.
 
I believe there has recently been a subtle change to this functionality such that it does not apply until you click 'Execute' but I think that is the only one.
 
To align the modelling axis to the average Normal of that selection, that is done in the PSR tools attributes under the Axis tab, where you would choose 'Selected' and 'Normal' as the options to get what you need. But I don't understand why you need it either because if you are using extrude that happens in the average normal direction anyway doesn't it, regardless of what axis is doing ?
 
CBR

OK, you'll be needing 2 dynamics tags and 1 dynamic connector, so that you can get hinge-like behaviour.
Connector gets rotated to match orientation of Card and moved to hinge point. Object A is pelvis mesh and Object B is Card (with tab as child of that).
 
Note you can't use a parent null here because it screws up the dynamics compound mesh thing, so just make the card a direct child of the part of the rig you want it attached to.
 
Collision mode will be compound mesh / moving mesh on Rigid body tag on the card, and you'll need a collider tag on the pelvis mesh, also set to moving mesh collision mode.
 
Sorry haven't had time to answer this earlier. Here's a simplified scene file if that helps...
 
basic collisons 01.c4d
 
CBR

I don't think it is fine in his version, but because it's just a general brown you can't really tell. I would expect to have to redo UV mapping after any editable remesh operation because the whole point order and layout, upon which UVs rely, changes.
 
CBR

Your screenshot shows you in model mode, and Gouraud shading yet we still see highlighted orange polys, which should not be the case - those should only be possible to be seen and selected in polygon mode.
 
Try saving, closing and restarting and see if it persists. When I load your scene I am not seeing the orange polys or anything else wrong...
 
CBR