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It's been very interesting following this thread for the last few weeks and reading all the different and passionate points of view, so I thought I'd throw my two cents in. Speaking frankly I'm pretty confused by the current direction of C4D. Working procedurally can definitely be a cool and efficient way to work, but Maxon's effort here seems to be mostly reactionary to get on board with what they perceive to be the new fad. IMO a procedural workflow really shines for dynamics and effects, and since C4D has no fluid system and not a much of a dynamics or particle system to speak of, I find little value in the procedural workflow. The idea of trying to compete with Houdini doesn't make much sense to me, since it will likely be many many years before C4D can even be considered a contender, and in the meantime C4D is trailing it's ACTUAL competitors in so many areas. Maya is already the artist friendly answer to effects with fantastic capabilities, while Blender is a great FREE alternative with an impressive host of features to boast. Neither software is perfect, but each one has areas where they excel and take no prisoners, such as Maya's amazing uv capabilities, or it's native renderer Arnold, or other fantastic features like Bifrost, Xgen, and Mash etc. Blender has really taken leaps and bounds to compete with Zbrush, and though Zbrush is the undefeated champion in terms of sheer polygon power, Blender has developed a rich sculpting program, and should be considered a viable alternative. Blender even beat Zbrush to the punch with their cloth brushes, although Pixologic quickly introduced this feature with highly impressive results, just like any smart developer would do to keep it's rep. Blender also has a realtime renderer, which is great for lookdev and maybe even final renders. This realization really hit home for me with a recent project; I finally gave up on C4D's neglected hair system and reintroduced myself to Xgen with the intention of using Arnold's proprietary USD system to render out of C4DtoA, when I had the sudden epiphany that Maya SHIPS with Arnold allowing me to forgo all that export hassle and render out of Arnold directly using Maya. Despite it's clunky and disorganized interface, I find myself moving to Maya more and more, which is ironic because C4D's interface is far superior to Maya's and that's one of the few 'features' Maxon chose to mess with. I could ramble on and on, but the basic point is that C4D has fast become a master at none, and really doesn't have a specialty area anymore. In my recent projects I have found myself using C4D less and less, opting to use other packages throughout the pipeline that are much more efficient and capable than C4D. I am confused by Maxon's decisions and wonder if they themselves know what their long-term goals are, but I guess time will tell. Thanks for reading 😀.

I've been working on a teeth shader in Arnold recently for a project, and while I haven't tried to replicate it in Cycles, I would say that the key to realistic teeth is nailing it's translucency, through the sss and/or the refraction channels. The attached image shows a tooth shader being driven completely by sss. (The character is kinda gross, so please try to disregard all the gunk and cracks in the model 🥴)

I took a quick look at your constrictor scene, and the first thing I noticed was that in the neck chain, joints 23-41 were twisting off course and not keeping a consistent up axis. Once I fixed this, the rig behaved predictably without giving weird twists. Try it for yourself and see if that helps. 🙂

If the shoulder joint is also being used as the first joint of the arm ik chain, it's possible that the shoulder joint is shifting due to the pole vector. This is just a guess, since I'm not sure what your initial setup was.

It's difficult to try and diagnose the problem without seeing the actual scene. Please upload your updated scene file and I'd be happy to try and help. 🙂

I raised the tolerance on the Symmetry object to about 10, and the extrude tool was affected to respect the centerline, and not create polygons in the middle.

I'm surprised they beat Epic Games to the punch 😮.

If the problem still isn't solved, please upload the file so we could try to troubleshoot. Thanks.