[Brian Jones]

have you tried turning OpenGL off?

[Brian Jones]

the help says this

GI Caches and Team Render

How do GI and Team Render work together?

Stills

With still you don’t have to make any changes; using the default render settings (not the Render Settings in conjunction with this), all Render Clients will participate in rendering a single cache file, which will also be used by all Render Clients during rendering.

Animation

First you must ascertain if a Camera Aniamtion or a Full Animation is being rendered (see above for an explanation of how these differ).

Full Animation: This can be sent directly to Team Render for rendering. Make sure that the Full Animation option is enabled in the Cache Files tab.
Camera Animation: All caches must first be pre-calculated without Team Render (this is the only way to achieve flicker-free results). Subsequently, the scene can be rendered in Team Render, including cache files.
The following applies to both methods: If pre-calculated cache files exist that should be used with Team Render, the Auto Load option must be enabled in the Cache Files tab.

If QMC Rendering is being used, which does not require caches, it can also be sent directly to Team Render.

which may not be related to your problem but it made me wonder if the problem goes away with QMC

[Brian Jones]

change the order of the deformers maybe if you haven’t already tied that

[Brian Jones]

never heard of that, does it do that in a simple setup or does it take something pretty complex to get the jumps?

[Brian Jones]

A GI Portal will help as will turning on Force Per Pixel in Discrete Area Sampling (and to a lesser degree) Discrete Sky Sampling.
That will drive render time up some, perhaps close to QMC value, QMC will definitely get rid of splotches but then you have to turn up the values to reduce grain, more time…
The light leaks with lower settings are the Density/Min/Max values in the IC settings

[Brian Jones]

It sounds like they are not clones, if so if they are all children of each other (a nested hierarchy) you select them all and rotate and each moves as much as all it’s parents and it’s own rotation so they ‘fan’. (there are some scripts to ‘chain and ‘un-chain’ out there which helps a lot when trying to make 250 objects an object hierarchy). Or all the separate objects can be put into a Fracture object and apply a Step effector to that (takes a bit of work as they will want to rotate at the center but it can be fixed). Or are they clones?

[Brian Jones]

maybe this has a hint https://vimeo.com/132829405 but detecting where the line is would be another matter. I assume your animated texture might change or else you would just keyframe the spline placement to match.

[Brian Jones]

the help says “This setting is available for almost all types of noise, with the exception of Electric, Gaseous, Random and Wavy Turbulence, and will loop the noise in accordance with the time in seconds defined (Animation Speed) must not be set to 0). A value of 0 will turn this effect off. Note that, internally, the animation speed can then be adjusted accordingly and therefore change.”

So, if you are not using one of those un-loopable noises it should work. Loop period is seconds but it’s really precise 0 – 300 frames is not 300 frames, it’s 301 frames and that does make a tiny difference (if it’s a tiny jump you are seeing) Loop period doesn’t have to be an integer so it can be adjusted. Animation speed will be changed internally to make it loop so some adjustments won’t seem to work (particularly at low speeds). Other than that, are you using Movement – that will break this.

[Brian Jones]

you can turn off Self Collision and use expresso to detect collision and then turn on self collision. If you don’t control the self-intersection it will still ‘explode’ when self collision is turned on though. Here’s an example with a Thrausi’d cube (Thrausi is not needed it just did the cuts) where there is no intersection but the closeness of the objects does make them start to separate during the fall if self collision is not turned off.

9769_xpressotokeepthrausitogetheruntilimpact.c4d.zip

[Brian Jones]

not enough info about how you made the sphere (I assume you are trying to make the opening as well), can you post the scene file (at least just the sphere part)?