[Brian Jones]

Adam, saw the post on CGTalk but they seem to have size limits on attachments

– this is all on the Mac

10.5 – good (my own test as yours won’t open – just the gesture not the particles)
12 – not good when it opens but if you adjust something in the Distorter (I just swapped Directional-Bidirectional-Directional) it redraws in the display (don’t know if that’s totally correct end but not perfect in the EOGL I’m thinking)
13 – same as 12
14 – same as 12
15 – good
16 – not good
17 – not good

9919_distorter.zip

[Brian Jones]

The best way to learn is whatever is best for you. Depends too on the time you have and whatever other experience you have. C4D is not a trivial program, it has a lot of power and like all powerful/flexible programs it has a learning curve and often things can be done more than one way. It’s easier than some to learn but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.
Tutorials and practice, read the manual – hover the mouse over the parameters of any tool and hit F1 (cmd-F1 on Mac) and it brings up the help for that tool without having to search, that’s huge. Lurk and ask questions on the boards, there are books, free tutorials and paid tutorials and schools, some online (I think) and certainly some schools in certain cities.

[Brian Jones]

you can use the bend on the Extrude directly or on all the editable parts directly by grouping the extrude (or parts) together with a bend under a Null – or you can use Connect on all the editable parts to make them one object and then use the Bend as a child of that as per usual.

The main thing whichever way you do it is to go to the caps in the Extrude and set them to Type – Quadrangles and make sure Regular Grid is checked. That gives the caps enough detail to actually be smoothly bent.

[Brian Jones]

good solution, that is the main problem, you can connect the spline to dynamics objects and the spline will follow the objects but it can’t stop them and stretches to make up the difference and not in a good way either, it’s always at the ends…

[Brian Jones]

the trails are splines and splines don’t render by themselves. You need to put the splines (the trail object) in a Sweep or XPSkinner for actual geometry or add an xpMaterial or Hair material to the xpTrail to see just the splines rendered or use Sketch and Toon to render the splines

[Brian Jones]

you don’t need tons, just some extras like in the example getting tighter towards the top at about half the distance of the last one (so to speak). (turn off the HNurb to see, of course) but it gets invisible without too much work

[Brian Jones]

that’s what happens with a SubD Surface (HyperNurbs) and a sphere type surface that all comes to a point – you can’t fix it by taking the central tri’s out an substituting an n-gon – it is possible to fix it (if you don’t want to reconstruct the helmet) by adding in loops as the polys ‘tighten’ at the top like this

9907_sphereinhypernperfect.c4d.zip

[Brian Jones]

I’m guessing your bulb walls have no thickness (like the real glass would have) they are just one poly thick (which means no thickness) – so the glass material is treating the entire bulb as one solid piece of glass so there is lots of refraction (which does look interesting if not realistic – good temple BTW).

[Brian Jones]

Sorry I can’t be more help but I don’t know Max at all, good luck with the TP

[Brian Jones]

in C4D’s version of TP the particle (animated or not) just has to be a child of a TP – Particle Geometry object to render but you can’t use an Instance of the particle object (it wont even render) it has to be the base object (don’t know if you just meant ‘instance’, the particle instance or if you meant an instance object used to generate the TP instance).
If the particle is animated it will always animate though, no special settings.