[Adamt]

Yes, they definitely take note of responses to their request form.

[Adamt]

There are some very good commercial DVD’s from 3DFluff.com

For free tutorials, check out c4dportal.com and c4dcafe.com

[Adamt]

Check out Mark’s tutorial: https://www.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=19&page=/articles/simpson_mark/waterdrop/index.html

[Adamt]

It’s an image by Dave Butler, but I don’t know of a copy online.

[Adamt]

Does it rotate in the viewport? If so, do you have rotation keying turned on (small icons to the right of the time slider)?

[Adamt]

[Scott Wright] “unfortunately yes, i have tried this, although it works, the texturing is lost and it turns into one material.”

You can save your materials with a little work. You have to make polygon selection tags for the separate objects, which you can then use to assign materials on the connected object. In other words, the connected object retains polygon selection tags but not material selections.

[Adamt]

[cbb] “bless you sir.
i’ve been using c4d since ’98, and who knows how many days i’ve lost clicking those two dots individually.”

Then you’ll love this: hold down Ctrl while clicking to change the dots of the selected object plus all children. Works in conjunction with the Alt shortcut too. 🙂

[Adamt]

[cbb] “well, i tried putting a sphere on a plane and using ‘apply to scene’ in AO, and i’m getting ambient occlusion that’s lit with an auto light.
true AO doesn’t use light at all. is there any way to do this, or is c4d’s AO dependent on light?”

You have a lot of options. One, you can use the AO shader in a material’s luminance, diffuse, and/or environment channel. Two, you can use the render tab option with “apply to scene” and “use sky environment” (requires sky dome). This will combine AO with scene lighting. Or three, you can render a separate AO pass wich will give you a pure AO render.

Some tutorials on using 9.5’s AO functions:

https://www.mvpny.com/AOtutorial/
https://web.telia.com/~u48040664/ao_ibl_local_v03.zip
https://web.telia.com/~u48040664/ao_ibl_global.zip

[Adamt]

No, AO has the ability to take the environment into account (for color information), but it doesn’t depend on it. I don’t have the sample scene so I don’t know how it’s set up.

[Adamt]

It’s hard to say without looking at the file, but it may be that the Max object has Phong/normals information that isn’t translated to .3ds (a format limitation). This is often a problem with models originating in nurbs programs. Also, since .3ds is triangles-only the object won’t smooth well in HN.

My suggestion would be to try to get the file in .fbx format, or failing that, .obj format.

Also, depending on how dense the mesh is, you might be able to fix the problem areas by running the “break phong smoothing” function on selected edges.

hth