Cerbera

Yes, there will need to be updates  to all C++ based plugins this time unfortunately. Rocket Lasso / GSG plugs already done, others in works.
 
CBR

It's on the wrong axis. Align the bend to +X and do 'fit to parent'. Also turn on 'Keep length' if it wasn't on already.
 

 
CBR

No, what you are looking at there is the subdivided result, NOT the base mesh. The deformer is acting upon the base mesh (because it is a child of it) NOT the subdivided result.
 
If you would like it to operate on the Subdivision surface directly, then you need to put it under a Null, and move the deformer to also be a child of that null. Then you will be deforming the generated result, not the base mesh under it, and will have more available segments to support the bend.
 
However, the rather better approach is the one I showed you above where you pull those polys out across a number of steps rather than all the way out in one go, if you see what I mean, and if you fix that the bend can stay right where it is as a child of the base object...
 
CBR

Please complete your profile so that we always know which version of the software you are running. Answers to questions vary greatly depending on version used !
 
OK it looks like you have copied a single model containing 2 bolts - presumably they came from a model that had collapsed symmetry at some point. Not sure why you mentioned nulls - there don't seem to be any.
 
To fix this just select the object, go to Poly mode, grab the move tool and double click one bolt in the viewport (the one you don't want), which should select all its polys. Press delete with your mouse over the viewport. Now only one bolt should remain, but its axis may be incorrect, so you can sort that using the Axis Centre Dialogue. You should change that axis so that is at the base of the bolt, with Y pointing up.
 
Yes to your second question as well. It is easy to get rows of bolts using splines generated from the underlying topology (using edge to spline function) driving cloners in Object mode. You can also place bolts directly on surfaces one at time where that is helpful using the Place Tool.
 
CBR

You are holding ctrl as you drag, right ?
 
Also, you should change modelling axis to Selected instead of World, though that won't affect this extrude.
 
CBR

Change the Cloner mode to Linear, and then you have per-step rotation values available.
 
CBR

'Centre axis to' will work if the option 'points centre' is enabled, which will place the axis at the average centre. What it won't do is reset its angle to those of the global space, so to do that you'd need to enable Axis Mode (top toolbar), get the coordinates manager, and zero out the rotation on X, Y and Z.
 
Alternatively you can use Axis centre dialogue to also reset rotation by checking on 'Alignment' and choosing 'World' for example as the coordinate space.
 
CBR

No, there is no environment baked in here (or at least no bitmaps were included with your file, so the reflections can't be coming from maps); simply reflections are turned up to max in the materials, and have a roughness of zero, so you create an almost mirrored look for the material, which is reflecting the default HDRI, which is how cinema previews reflections in viewport.
 
Just turn reflection down from 1 to something like 0.3, and turn roughness up to fix this...
 
CBR

OK, so you'd like to animate that text so it appears hand-written ?
 
In that case you need to do one of 2 things for the main approach, and some additional things, which will improve stuff regardless of which approach you take.
 
1. If you want all of the word to appear in one go, and with one animation, then it needs to be a single continuous spline segment.
2. If it is not possible to connect all the letters into a single spline and get it looking how you want, then you will have no choice but to animate the sweep individually per letter, so that you can stagger them. You'll be needing a sweep object per letter in that case.
 
So you need to do one of the above. But also.
 
Change the intermediate points of your spline to 'uniform', which will make the writing animation a lot smoother and at more consistent speed along all points of it. Add or remove points in the sketched spline to make sure they are as evenly spaced as they can be. Do not let your sketched splines pass through each other - move the points in Z space and adjust their tangents, so they flow nicely behind or in front of the parts they cross.  
CBR

Have a read of this, from HelloLuxx's page on the subject...
 
With Redshift, you use the RS Color User Data node. You need to make sure you specify which attribute you are reading...  you should use Mograph / Color (RSMGColor).  These colour values can then be piped directly into your material channels or for more control wire this through a Ramp node and this works just like the C4D Coloriser Shader.  You can define the colour range directly in the Field’s Color Remap Gradient or in the RS Ramp, both options offer different benefits.
 
CBR

You could delete half the mesh, and add symmetry, so the current poly selection is transferred to the other side ?
 
CBR

You got inheritance effector on wrong matrix.
 

 
CBR

That should be fabulously easy to sort out in UV Edit, but we have to make some allowances for the fact that your image isn't square, which means we have to manually stretch the UVs Cinema auto-generates to fill the square UV canvas, so that ALL the image fits on all the object if you see what I mean. I don't know if you want to fix the mesh to get rid of all the unnecessary triangles, but if you do, you should do so BEFORE you do UV unwrapping.
 
When finished your UV should look like this...
 

 
1. Go into UV Edit and select both the object AND its UV tag, then Poly Mode, and Ctrl-A to select all of them.
2. Find the UV Unwrap button in the middle column and press it once, which will give you a narrow strip of polys at a weird angle like so...
 

 
3. Go to UV packing, turn off preserve orientation, turn on stretch to fit and hit apply, which should align that strip to the top of the UV canvas and make it (almost) fill it.
 
If it guesses this wrong and the lines are going horizontally across the canvas instead of up and down it like they should be, then you can use the Transform tab / rotation settings in the UV panel to rotate it 90 degrees so it looks like my example above (top)
 
4. Lastly, apply a material to the object and make sure it is using UV mapping as the mapping type.
 
CBR

Most of it's in the r-click menu for any node. Here you can align to grid, centre and arrange the nodes and a whole lot more besides.
Changing the colour of a node is as easy as selecting it and changing its colour in the basic tab of the attributes...
We can add annotations via the remark node.
 
Conduits for node wires might be expecting a bit much though !
 
CBR

Did you not take in any of the information I gave you in your last post about this, in which I pointed out that the character object could not possibly work with this model ? The Character object is for binding to a true 3D mesh, and you do not have that - you have a flat superman 'logo' which has been extruded from splines. That is not animatable unless (as I also pointed out last time) you only do General PSR transforms relative to the camera, which doesn't involve the character object at all.
 
CBR
 
 
 

If I open your file it comes in with 2 freeze tags, and is broken. If I delete the top freeze tag it works as expected. Have you got the latest version / service pack for R25 ? It sounds like the version you have might be bugged...
 
CBR

If I understand you correctly (which I am not sure I do)...
 
Edge mode, Move tool, double-click the 2 edges you want to remove (should select the whole loop all way round letter), r-click, dissolve ?
 
CBR

I might retitle this, as you are actually talking about 'cage geometry' which doesn't have anything to do with transparency.
 
I don't have Ricochet, but feel sure that any plugin by CS and team will have options for thinning out and controlling the density and distribution of the connecting splines - are you sure you have exhausted all the options and possibilities within its settings ?
 
But if you are sure Ricochet isn't the answer then there are other things to try.
 
1. Atom Array
 
Dropping any model under this generator will give you generated sweeps on all the polygon edges and spheres on all the junctions, making reasonably nicely displaying 'cage' geometry.  If the spheres are minimized in size you can make them almost invisible if that suits your plans more. This can get you the sort of look you want, and its greatest strength is that is entirely geo-dependent, which means you can design every aspect of it, but can't do any internal connections unless there is geometry there also. So whilst I think this might be useful to you just be aware you would have to create additional models inside that mesh to get an inner structure, and the connections between inner and outer structures might have to be made manually, which is no great stress if you use spline and point snapping...
 
2. Cloned nulls + Tracer
 
If you clone some nulls to the surface of your model, then you could setup multiple tracers to connect pairs of them, which would give you a lot of control over how many connections there were, and where they appeared...
 
3. Voronoi Fracture
 
For a completely different kind of cage, and to have some internal geometry created for you, you could try VF and various hull / invert settings...
 
That gives you a rather unattractive webby-type look (left, below) but you can also not invert it, and then just Atom Array the original Fracture to get the sort of result in the middle...
 
There's a lot of ways to control the source objects that affect that internal geo so I would spend quite a lot of time playing with this.
If you want less organic and more straight-form structures, use matrixes, splines, planes or primitives as point sources. On the right below that's a matrix driving the VF, giving you more scaffolding-like results.
 

 
By simply adjusting the density of a Matrix for example, and adding another Atom Array to the main geo as well we can get some very High quality truss-like forms...
 

 
I'm sure there will be other ways too, but this should give you some ideas to be going along with...
 
CBR
 

Couple of problems here. Sculpting is working, but parts of your mesh are not ! 🙂  The first is the normal direction of the polys in the waistcoat, which are wrong (blue), and therefore you won't be able to sculpt on the front sides of these meshes until those are fixed by selecting the wrong polys (I think it's all of them, so Ctrl-A) and finding Reverse Normals from the r-click menu. The shirt has a similar problem caused by it having no actual thickness, which means we see in the inverted normals in the folded collar area as well.
 

 
Secondly, because all these meshes are a single object, sculpting them on an individual basis will be extremely difficult and it will be almost impossible to avoid one section intersecting another. I would seriously suggest splitting the model into its various parts to allow you to sculpt each mesh alone, which will get you much more control over the individual parts and should prevent you moving other bits unintentionally.
 
I also notice you have activated sculpting but only at Level 0, with no subdivision, which is unusual.
 
Lastly, you are making life very difficult for yourself by having mesh inside mesh inside mesh. The rather superior approach is to not have any body mesh under clothes unless those clothes will be removed during any subsequent animation. So, there is no need for actual poly arms, chest or torso if it is hidden by clothing. Likewise there is no need to model the whole shirt when the vast majority of it is covered by waistcoat ! So really, the body mesh here should consist of the head, down to just under the neckline, and the hands - the rest of it is covered by clothing or shoes, and all the time it is there is just an additional intersection risk for you with every modelling or sculpting tool you deploy on it, and when it moves later when rigged, if that is what you will be doing with it.
 
CBR

Yeah - you leave a quite a lot to chance if you try and do this with displacement. I would suspect it is going to be tricky to get a flawless result using this method because displacement requires even geometry which your base mesh is not providing at the moment.
 
The layout of your UVs, where you have appear to have relaxed the polys that make up the sides of the strap holes into the space where the hole should be - I bet that is causing at least some of the problems - I don't think the ridges should extend to the sides of those holes, yet are being told to do so by your UV. So one suggestion would be to split off the UVs that comprise the sides of those holes, and move them somewhere on the UV map where displacement is not applied, which should leave them smooth. Without your files I am uncertain if this is the complete solution.
 
What I would do, on the other hand, is just bin off the displacement altogether and model it properly, grooves and all, meaning that we can very specifically direct the topology to get a much nicer / more predictable result. If we use sufficient poly density we can probably get away without control loops, or can handle those with edge weighting instead. Modelling it might not be as difficult as you may be imagining - you can use symmetry so you only have to model half, and the only thing you have to pay attention to is that your topology around the hole allows the continuance of those grooves - I modelled a single section below so you can see what I mean...
 

 
CBR
 

Ok, that second scene makes it a lot clearer what the problems with the first one were.
 
First of all - turn the subdivision down in the Cloth Surface - having L5 (or L7 like your first scene) in there is a completely ridiculous value and is the entire reason the scene is horribly slow and memory intensive. That should be no higher than L2, if it is needed at all, which it probably isn't. Also you should know that this subdivision is not doing anything good here, whatever level it's on, because the topology of the text is both uneven and triangulated because the intermediate points in the spline and caps settings in the Extrude are not optimal either.
 
However all that aside, your animation IS doing what you told it to do.
 
There are 2 keyframes on that object, and they work; text starts one thickness, and reduces from there until next keyframe. There are no additional keyframes, so it stays there. If I add another keyframe after that, inflating it again, that also works for me ! So, still a bit unclear about what you think isn't working here...
 
CBR
 
 
 
 

Ah Ok I get ya... that'll be because you seem to have inadvertently set your modelling axis position / orientation to World and World, as opposed to  Selected and Axis like they used to be !! Mine'll look a bit different to yours but the main fields should be the same...
 

 
Once you've done that you should find that coords manager reflects the current selected component using the selection tools as well as the transform ones.
 
CBR

If you have HB modelling bundle, retopo is a breeze and a joy, but even without it Cinema is capable, if not stellar in this area, particularly in latest versions, where we have the relax mode for the brush and magnet tools and we can project poly pen to underlying meshes live as we use it.
 
I can't answer if 3D coat is better for this, never having used it, but the fact that I do retopo pretty much every day, and have never felt the need to leave Cinema to do it must say something...
 
CBR

OK, my strategy for mirrorballing that shape would be to make a grid array of plane objects that you align to the first flat face on your object, then make it editable, connect the pieces into a single mesh, and do a couple of knife cuts along the edges, deleting the polys that remain outside those. If you use the workplane alignment functions you can actually create the plane and cloner pre-aligned to the face in question, which is helpful.
 
Then you can extrude them by a set amount and add a bevel deformer on the parent group. Then you can mirror, symmetry or otherwise transform that plane so you get the other side for free. And then it's just rinse and repeat for every remaining side. I would expect to be able to get that done in about half an hour. This 1 face took about 5 minutes...
 

 
You can add various effectors before you make the cloner editable if you want a bit more real world randomness in there for example, which will be important for the sparkles, as for the most effectiveness of those you will want every one of the pieces angled subtly differently from its neighbours - if you leave them all exactly planar (as I have done above for illustrative purposes) that very much reduces the effectiveness of the mirror ball look, which is why you mostly see that on spheres....
 
CBR

Please put the version of Cinema you are using in your profile so that we know what functionality is available to you...
 
Bend deformers are definitely the way to go here ! Nothing else gives you as much control over where bending happens and how much of it there is over time. To try and recreate that using dynamics is probably expecting too much of dynamics !
 
Mograph can be used, possibly in blend mode between 2 models, each with bend deformers set to +max strength and -max strength amounts, so it can interpolate between them across however many clones you make. Then you should be able to keyframe either of those bend deformers to get the sort of result you want.
 

 
Adding a delay effector in either blend or (subtly used) spring modes on the cloner will help naturalise that motion.
 
CBR