StCanas

Hi Just tried to send you a message but it tells me you can’t receive. Check your preferences and I’ll be in touch. Cheers Karl

Quite simply, they've driven me away with the pricing. I'm not upgrading anymore and I'm slowly drifting away from CGI as a way of making a living. And that's a shame as I really like it as an art form.

Sculpt.

You've done pretty good so far. Just need to take it up a notch. I spend as much time as I can finding as many high res reference images as I can find as my starting point. You can never have too much reference. Also, as this is a pretty commonly modelled item, search out other people's efforts and study their wireframes to see how they've solved the various modelling challenges. And when you think you've finished, you probably haven't. There's probably another layer of detail just waiting to happen.

It will be a simple Spline and Sweep, something like this... Sweep.c4d

I think the two examples above have too much geometry. One of the points of SDS modelling, apart from the fact that it can do all the weird shapes, is that you can get those shapes while keeping your poly count low. Try this... SDS Example.c4d Hopefully, Cerbera will pop along at some point. He's an SDS geek (in the best possible sense ) so he'll probably have something valuable to add to the conversation. By the way, your original attempt is nice and clean so, unless you were on a mission to keep your polys low (big complicated scene, long render times, for instance), I see nothing wrong with doing it that way.

You can get that effect with this plug-in... https://code.vonc.fr/?a=67 I used it to make this element that was part of a medical animation...

Although this will be considered bad form by most (and probably is), I wouldn't bother with the faff of modelling the holes and just concentrate on the hump then knock off the holes with a quick Boole. Like this... Bracket Collect 2.zip

Start with a suitable, editable block. Put some cuts in your top, Extrude Inner, then Bevel. Very simple.

You have time to do 'other stuff' as well as all the help you give people here?! :-)

Do the text in something like Illustrator and bring it in to C4D.

No need for faffing with Xpresso. Just throw a bunch of random keyframes in for the intensity (say a dozen or so) and then just drag copy them along the timeline as needed, Job done. Shouldn't take you more than a minute to set that up.

Very nice work indeed.

The very nature of the question suggests you're not going to get very far with this until you get some coding and understanding of the process under your belt. I mean, I assume you wouldn't go onto an aviation forum and ask "hi all bro and sis, I want to learn to fly a plane,but i don't have knowledge about flying so how could i do,Please?" That's kind of what you've done here.

There's also the dpit2 plugin, though I'm not sure of its status these days. It will do the growing thing, though.

Is there a reason you can't just keyframe it?

What does it do?

Everything you need to know as far as pistons is in Kiwi's video (Hi Nigel!). I made this following that tutorial... Pistons-desktop.m4v

Displacement?

Ha, ha! That was wonderful. Thanks for posting.

I would comment that I think you might be making a mistake by majoring on Octane. Logic suggests that any collection of materials for C4D should have, as its starting point, a native C4D set. You can also have your Octane, Vray, Arnold etc versions sitting along side but there should be a C4D native set given that that will be the most used render engine. While it might be easy enough to distribute the textures amongst the various channels, you're making a giant number of potential customers jump through hoops that they shouldn't have to and that's going to put a great number of buyers off at the first hurdle. Further to that, while I have no idea of the actual figures, my guess is that Octane is one of the lesser used engines for C4D, on a par perhaps with Arnold, so it could be argued that the order should run something like C4D native, Vray, Octane, Arnold, other. Great set of texture, all the same. This set will definitely be at the front of my mind next time I have some stone in a render.

True, it might be a complete mess. But as far as what we can see there, it looks very nice. And, besides, if it renders up O.K. then it doesn't matter how much gimpy geo there is in it, so it might, or might not matter.

Very nice modelling.

By the way, although I'll take them any way they come, if you're canvasing opinion, then I vote for a Vray version and an Arnold version. :-)