[Adam Trachtenberg]

I haven’t tried it, but perhaps this would work?
https://greyscalegorilla.com/2011/09/fisheye-camera-in-cinema-4d/

[Adam Trachtenberg]

To get the curving lines I would either use soft selections or the polygon brush tool. Both offer falloff options that can be edited to taste.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

The lathe axis is determined by the location of the lathe object. By default it’s created at world center, but you can move it anywhere you like.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

If you can’t get the objects to export properly, try this:

1. Select the object and run Mesh>Commands>Optimize. This will weld points that are supposed to be connected. You may need to adjust the Optimize command’s tolerance setting which you access by clicking the little gear icon next to the menu entry;

2. With the object still selected, run Mesh>Conversion>Polygon Groups to Objects. That will split the object into individual pieces.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Generally the only times you need to be concerned about topology are when you intend to use subdivision surfaces or when you intend to deform the mesh.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

In addition to what Brian said … if your light setup is an area light rig (maybe from GSG?), you can disable “show in render” in the area light’s Details tab.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Posted originally that you’d have to make the Voronoi editable, but that doesn’t help because you lose the mograph animation.

What you could do is export the scene in Alembic format. If you have a problem importing that into your other application you can actually open the Alembic file in C4D and then use that to bake the individual pieces.

Works like this:

* Open the Alembic file;
* Unfold the null containing the pieces, selected all the pieces, and drag them into the Timeline;
* Run the Timeline>Functions>Bake command with (at minimum) expressions, position, and rotations checked;
* Select all the pieces in the Object Manager and make them editable;
* Delete all the Alembic morph tags.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

I don’t know of any way to get the exact dimensions directly, but here’s an ass-backward way to get them:

Use the Edges tool to select all the edges along the top border of your polygon selection. Then run the Mesh>Commands>Edge to Spline command. That will create a spline along the edges and make it a child of your object. Do the same thing for one of the sides of the polygon selection.

Now you have two splines, and fortunately it is possible to measure the length of a spline using Xpresso.

Create an Xpresso tag (doesn’t matter what object it goes on) and drag both splines into the editor window. Create Object out ports for both spline nodes. Then create and Xpresso>General>Spline node and add a “Length” out port.
Copy and paste the spline node and then connect the two of them to the spline object nodes.

Finally, create two Result nodes and connect the Length outputs to the Result inputs. That will give you the flattened dimensions, or aspect ratio, of your polygon selection, which you can use to set up your AE comp.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

I’m not able to open the file, but I suspect you may be using the standard renderer and have an alpha-mapped texture where the dof vanishes? If so that’s a limitation of the standard render dof effect. It doesn’t work through transparencies. Workaround would be to use the physical renderer.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Seems to be a bug that was introduced with R18. I can confirm the issue. I tried unpacking the xGroup and setting it up exactly like the one in R17 but it still doesn’t work in R19. I saved out the R17 preset and imported it into R19 and it worked, but when I unpacked it in R19 it broke again. I reported it to Maxon, FWIW.