Cerbera

Turn off Background under Overrrides.
 
CBR

No indeed. Whilst Cinema does have this functionality intended (to work with shift modifier I am told) it's not quite working yet, but should be at some point.
 
CBR

The cloner on the right does not have any effectors in its list.
 

 
Drag the effectors you want in there manually.
 
This happens when you don't have a cloner selected when you add the effector, or add a new cloner after adding effectors to the previous one.
 
CBR

You are using a floor object, a special kind of primitive which stretches off infinitely into the distance in the render, but this is not shown in the viewport, hence your possible confusion. You can fix that by replacing it with a plane of the right scale for your scene, which will be of finite and definable size, and therefore can stop when you want it to, leaving some horizon visible.
 
CBR

At its simplest, we can make the speaker faces with this sort of density...
 

 
...and that might be even enough to displace holes into if you're lucky, and want to tackle those via textures.
If you are modelling the holes, then you will still have to build something like this first so you have a surface to project or conform the holes mesh to, because that is invariably going to be created flat first if you go that way...
 
OR, you could go the volume builder way, and abandon SDS altogether ! 
 

 
So that is just the front panel above (but without the sides) thickened, and under L4 SDS, in a volume builder / mesher, with a grid-array cloner of cylinders subtracted from it. You can make the cloner editable and delete the clones so that you get the patterns you want in the corner areas - I only did it roughly, but you get the idea hopefully...
 
If you do go that way, you will need a very low voxel size - 0.5 or similar, which will produce a horrendously dense mesh you can try and rescue with ZRemesher, though I don't envy you the time that will take to calculate !
 
CBR
 

No. Layouts shouldn't go there - the layouts should be copied to the library / layout folder within your preferences folder (which can be opened directly from within Cinemas preferences; see button at the bottom), and then the program restarted, after which they should show up.
 
CBR

If you want a properly realistic result with zero distortion in the thickness of the strands of the metal meshwork then you really have to model that panel in that shape. But I don't think we do want that. In the real world a flat mesh is press deformed into the shapes required, so we should try and mimic the physical consequences of that, which will include some distortion of the perfect pattern, but no variation of wire thickness.
 
However, because the curvature is only slight , or at least the bits where it's not slight are only at the very edges, and mainly hidden by the frame, I suspect the distortion you'll get with something like an FFD or Mesh Deformer might be OK to get you a decent result despite a tiny amount of thickness variation that will get introduced along the way.
 
So, assuming this end section is likely to be made from a circular section of mesh, your first job should be to boole intersect a square section of mesh with a cylinder, and make that a single editable object. At that point you may be able to try soft selection to pull a nice curve out of the end section, or you can try it with less scope for human inconsistency with deformers, of which I think mesh deformer will be most successful, the cage object being a cylinder with about 6 cap segments.
 

 
A mesh deformer, yesterday.
 
On another note, you may want to fix the rogue triangles and near coincident polys that is making your main metalwork look scrappy round the edges, and I suspect we need some phong breaks there as well for truly clean, sharp cornering, especially if you are not using SDS.
 
CBR

Enable Redshift Menu in preferences / renderer / Redshift, and then it appears in that new menu in main toolbar.
 

 
You can also get it via Shift- C (command manager), searching Shader graph for example.
 
CBR

Not really. The usual way we select groups IS the object manager. Although if you put objects in a Connect (weld off), that is easily selectable in vp, as is a null if you give it a clearly visible icon...
 
CBR

...or the transform controls in UV edit...
 
CBR

Yes I was looking for that the other day ! I think it has gone. However, we can fix the points directly in the Rope Tag.
 

 
Other than we also have the Rope Belt Tag for attaching them to other objects.
 
CBR

No, you are doing that wrong. You would ordinarily never just put a weight tag on an object - instead you should create one by using the SDS Weighting TOOL (M,R) to set a weight for selected edges. Once you have done that the tag is automatically created with the weight information you set. You should also Store Selection for the edges so you can get to them again if you need to adjust the weighting later, as there is no way to select previously weighted components.
 
CBR

Well, if you double click that tag, then the material should get loaded into Attributes panel.... and scroll to object (S) should work in the Material manager as well AFAIK. You can change the colour of the yellow border in prefs / color schemes / interface but you can't make it thicker. It has been raised with Maxon before that some people find this hard to see.
 
CBR

2 main approaches to that I would say...
 
1. Hard Surface: People may advise you that Star Splines in Extrudes are a decent starting point here but I would argue they don't actually save you much time over just modelling it properly, so I'd do that instead.
 
2. SDS poly model: Whereas with the HS method we start at the outside and work our way in, with the SDS method I would say better to start at the centre and work outwards. And we can use symmetry across the depth of it (here Z) so we only have to model one half. You could actually use 3 way symmetry here, but there is no real advantage to doing so because most of the moves we need to make next are radially based, and Symmetry on X and Y as well would actually make those moves more convoluted / awkward.
 
So get a disc primitive, same radial segments as amount of ridges you want on the winder (I went with 24), make that editable, Inset and quadrify that, and gently curve it outwards at the front to get the nice smooth dome on the end. Then we need to get the ridges out of the perimeter, which we can do by selecting every other edge and Extrude outwards (90 degrees rotation), popping back to repeat that move on the remaining edges. That will give you this if you've done it right...
 

 
Now we need to select all the outer perimeter edges, set the Scale tool to Normal Mode, tick Along Normals and drag on the blue axis band until we get near points (but don't go all the way to points), like so...
 

 
Then I am sure you can see how we can move those back on Z to get the angle there, then select the whole perimeter, and extrude backwards, and zero-scale to make it flat, then move Object Axis to that rear loop and apply Z-symmetry, before adding control loops and SDS to give you something like this...
 

 
CBR

Lols - yes, here I am, and the answer here is particularly low-effort and easy, using, as we will, the oft-forgotten sculpt function, the Unsubdivide command, which you should get initially via shift+C / Command Manager.
 
Running that on the original collapsed SDS version will reduce it to its base cage, and you can then extract a polygon copy of the level 0 model from that using the sculpt layout / menus. What you can't do is just delete the sculpt tag, or do Current State to Object - neither of those will work here.
 

 
CBR

There are indeed lots of approaches to this sort of thing.
 
The simplest would be to make a null at the centre of your large sphere. Position the smaller sphere exactly on the surface of the bigger one somewhere, then make it a child of the null. If you want to position that accurately, simply create the large sphere at world centre, then add up its radius and that of the smaller sphere, and set that value in coordinates manager...
 
Then get a vibrate tag on the null, and give it 360 degrees of rotation in all axes, setting a frequency of around 0.1 - 0.3. Press play.
 
Smaller sphere will appear to roll randomly over the surface, but actually isn't rolling, just moving with a fixed offset which makes it 'seem' to chase the surface. But unless your spheres are textured with some sort of pattern that will not be obvious, so if the rolling sphere is just a block colour, or chrome or something then it wouldn't have to actually roll...
 
If it does need to physically roll, then you can add bullet rigid body dynamics to that setup, and carefully balance follow position / rotation with the non-dynamic animation so that you still get the movement of the vibrate tag but also have physical collision properties, which if got right, will make it actually roll on the surface.
For that you may need an attractor force placed at the centre of the large sphere to drag the rolling sphere inwards onto the surface, and a lot of friction on both objects, the larger sphere being the collider that prevents that smaller ball ever reaching the source of the attractor...
 
Update: I didn't even need the attractor - just lots of friction !
 

 
rotating sphere CBR.c4d
 
CBR
 
 

The short answer is that this is one of those very rare shapes that Extrude alone cannot deal with ! The reasons for that are to do with the way it averages / combines contributing edges' angles of conjunction at points of termination and the extrapolation thereof, in which there is scope for error, and the way that error manifests is the inaccurate positioning of the newly extruded surface. Simple hey ? No, but I am less interested in the 'why does it do that ?' than in the 'how do we get around it ?' once we accept it does, as we surely must...🙂
 
I started off by removing the ngons in the base shape caused by that rogue vertex in the middle on one side.
Then we have the option to Inset all faces, but we shouldn't do that. Instead we will apply a bevel in Solid mode so that we get box corners everywhere, which are the best chance of controlling and defining the geometry there particularly in relation to keeping corners sharp after any future subdivision. But it also has a corollary effect of allowing Extrude to better know what is going on and thereby allow it to work in a (slightly) more easily correctable way.
 
Now, some things to note. If Extrude fails, so will a Zero-extrude and subsequent Normal Move; they both use the same 'averaging' calculations to get the result, so the same errors will occur. So instead we have to do the extrude, and fix its fail points manually, which isn't ideal, but is what we have to do ! I would be interested to see if the extrude functions in Blender and Houdini can do better.
 
So we need X-ray mode at this point, so we can see exactly what is occurring throughout our extrude process, and thereby see what we need to correct to make up for its shortcomings. And in most cases we will have just a single vertex to move at each of the major points of the model. Initially we should do that by eye, but when you are close you can break out such new tools as Straighten Edges (or HB_lineUp if you have HB Modelling bundle) to further repair things. This one took me about 5 mins to clean up to a standard I would call 'reasonable' !
 

 
If there is a way to do all this automatically I have not yet found it, and suspect I never will, unless scene nodes can come dramatically to the rescue, but alas I don't have the time today to get into those...
 
UPDATE: Fellow C4D alumni Noseman has since pointed out that we can see the erroneous extrude directions if we look at the Vertex normals (with the phong tag set at a similarly high angle to that we needed to use in the Extrude)...
 

 
As those are not directly editable, that would seem to be the end of that particular avenue, at least as far as auto-type solutions are concerned...
 
CBR
 

Splines in extrudes if you want to do it fast.
 
But if you want to do it nicely then starting with a 64 segment disc primitive (with inner radius) for the main circle would be a good start. Other than that it's all very simple primitive shapes you just need to get the segmentation right so you can connect things like the reference.
 

 
Then add thickness as needed via regular extrude. If you want to use SDS you'd need some control loops as well obviously, and quads are good, but ultimately not necessary, as no part of this isn't planar.
 
CBR

Cache the rope sim, then playback to the frame you want to preserve, and do Current State to Object and delete the cache tag on the new copy. That works for me.
 
CBR

Welcome to the Core 🙂
 
Yep, so those are essentially centre-tapered cylinders that emerge from plane objects containing the right topology (ie circular at the base). Subdivision Surfaces provides all the smoothing, so this can be very low poly.
 

 
You need to complete your profile to tell us which version of Cinema you have, so that we know which tools are available to  you, and also to give us some idea of your level of modelling so that we can tailor advice to your level....
 
CBR

That's really not how fields are designed to be used. Selections are made with selection tools of which we have many ! Fields can interact with (for example) vertex maps, but not component selections directly AFAIK.
 
What exactly are we looking at there? Are you trying to select a whole object, groups of polygons, or (as it looks from the yellow area) partial polygons, which is impossible with ANY selection tool  !! We need to know what you are trying to achieve more globally / in a wider context so we can properly advise. The scene file would help as well, so we can see what that is made from !
 
CBR

That is working for me just fine in 26.014. Please could you upload a scene file where you have the problem, and which version of S26 is this pls ?
 
EDIT: I HAVE just managed to make it crash in latest release version, so have demo scene file, and have logged it.
Thank you for the report !
 
CBR

Several ways... though they don't apply to ALL versions of Cinema, and you don't say which version you are using.
 
1. Just keep clicking. Cinema is quite clever about how it selects things. So if you have nothing selected, and you click once on a child of a Fracture in the VP you get the Fracture selected. If you click again in the same place you get the child you are hovering over....
 
2. Hold Ctrl (Win) and r-click the object, which will produce a list of all items under your cursor from which you can choose with left click.
 
3. Select it in the Object Manager instead.
 
CBR

Where did you get the selection tags from to feed the bevel ?
Actually I think you can also get those selections straight from the Generator using Start and End Shell checkboxes in selections tab. But you need both ends in 1 tag ideally, or otherwise 2 bevel deformers.
 
CBR

Look up Fracture in the help. That allows you take extrude objects (for example) and have them react as if they were a MoGraph Object to effectors and such like.
 
If you need letter by letter control, then you'll be needing to explode the overall spline into its individual letters, which should each get their own extrude object under the fracture.
 
CBR