JSoft

If you haven't found it yet, be sure to read the bible of CG cinematic lighting: https://chrisbrejon.com/cg-cinematography/ And also a short one on why 3-point lighting is a bad habit: https://cg-masters.com/cg-lighting-myth-1-3-point-lighting-is-good/ I tend to use HDRIs as a weak "fill" light for a starting point based on the mood of the scene - warm/cool, high/low contrast, saturation, etc. You'll often find HDRIs categorized this way on sites likes HDRI Haven. The rest depends on manual placement of lights through experimentation and reference. The key driver is how you want the scene to feel, and it doesn't matter if it takes 1 dome light or 100 spot lights.

This one's tricky because of how mograph selections don't re-sort the indexes and only hides them. Scalar User Data: MoGraph ID Normalized > Change Range: 0 - 1 to 0 - # of polys in selection > MultiShader: Integer Loop. Only thing I can't figure out is how to procedurally get the poly count out of the scene nodes random select into the out max of the Change Range shader node. Multishader Selection.c4d

Not sure if you still need help with this but Redshift/RoyalRender user here for the past 6 years or so. Setting this up is a bit confusing but you're on the right track. In your local preferences folder (c:\Users\you\AppData\Roaming\MAXON\Cinema_Version) you'll find a settings.userinstallation.json file. This stores the path of the shared asset database that you set up to use locally. The next step is to copy that .json file to a shared location and edit the Royal Render environment to use that shared prefs location. The RR docs explain how to edit your environment variables but again it can be a little confusing with all of the files involved. In the RR install folder the environment files are in //RoyalRender/render_apps/_setenv/all. There is an environment config for each 3D app so look for the cinema 4d*.rrEnv ones. Note that the only one you should create/edit is the cinema 4d__inhouse.rrenv file. This is your custom environment that remains untouched by any RR updates. Add the g_userprefs = Z:\PATH_TO_SHARED_PREFS line to this file. All Royal Render clients will now use that shared prefs directory and the corresponding asset database(s) that are defined in the .json file.

I've been wondering the same thing, ePMV stability is pretty terrible even in Blender. I haven't really been able to find anything else, but one possibility that I've been curious about is importing .pdb data and generating geometry through scene nodes. It's really just a CSV text file with a list of atoms and their data so it should be feasible and much more fast/stable than ePMV. By coincidence, the what's new video for R25 shows this exact thing being done (https://youtu.be/iXDCiNiULNY?t=380). Now I just gotta learn scene nodes...

@jedAwesome tool thank you Coincidentally I needed something like this the day you re-posted

I'm of the opinion that artists should be open to learning as many tools as possible, regardless of how painful it may be. The industry and the software move much too quickly to remain "stuck" in a single package, and you may find yourself falling behind by not exploring the capabilities that other tools may offer you. I started out in high school using Blender (2.0 i think it was), then dabbled in (Discreet) 3ds Max and C4D which was prob R12 or something at the time. In college it was back to (Autodesk) Max and Maya since those were the primary industry standards. When I started working most of the company was on Softimage but I stuck with Maya because well...you know. Even though I became very comfortable with Maya I kept learning other tools to see what they were each best suited for and developed my own preferences for workflow. As of today we are transitioning to Cinema as our studio's primary DCC, but I also make use of Houdini, ZBrush, and Substance for work stuff while mainly using Blender at home for personal projects. The point is, you certainly do not have to give up one to progress with another. You are simply adding to the toolset that you have available to you as an artist (up to the capacity that your brain is capable of holding). Yes, it's tough to move to a different package when you've become very accustomed to your "home" DCC. But I've found that learning the fundamentals in any program makes moving between tools that much easier. After that, it only becomes a matter of learning how to execute those fundamentals in a specific program. So, for example, if you're familiar with the Polygon Pen in Cinema 4D, you're already most of the way there when it comes to using Multi-Cut in Maya. It's way easier to learn a shortcut or menu location than to learn a tool from scratch. And @GazzaMataz is right...Houdini, Houdini, Houdini