[Brian Jones]

Adam’s file shows it if you turn off the Boole (which I assume you did) – probably have to see your landscape boole (the scene file or just that part of it) to tell what is happening.

[Brian Jones]

the help for Bake Texture Options/Reflection says “When rendering reflections, one exception applies compared with the other material channels: Here you don’t have to specifically activate Reflectance – reflections will be baked regardless.”. You’d have to ask Support to be sure but I have to guess it means it’s not going to listen to reflectance settings since it doesn’t even need them to function.

[Brian Jones]

you don’t say but you definitely have to make a keyframe at one point in the timeline then move to a different time in the timeline (different frame) then animate the object (move/rotate/scale etc) then make a new keyframe. If you don’t move the timeline in-between keyframes you just over-write the first one and there is no animation

[Brian Jones]

expanding: – Object Manager/View menu/Folding/Unfold All

selecting inside: – the Object manager of course but in the viewport shift-Right-click or control-right-click

[Brian Jones]

HDRI is high dynamic range image – check out the wikipedia article “High-dynamic-range imaging” for more info. Basically they have higher dynamic range in an image, more like reality which makes lighting a scene with images when using Global Illumination better quality. Most of them are meant to be put on spheres or a Sky object

[Brian Jones]

just plug the equations into a Formula spline like this 9533_trefoilknot.c4d.zip

The scale is pretty small with those numbers but you can either make it bigger by using multipliers in the math or just scale it up afterwards. It’s also not a closed spline as parametric so it has to be made editable and closed there. If the length is one radian (6.283) it seems easiest to weld the two end points.

[Brian Jones]

Ah, extrude along the spline not move along the spline, still works but the star would be better as a XY plane orientation – it’s usually better to extrude/loft along the lofted splines Z axis – I’m guessing you were trying various things to get it to line up along the spline and I didn’t try to figure out what, I just reoriented the star and put in a new cloner and Spline effector.
Then I changed the F-Curve of the Spline effector’s End parameter so it stops abruptly, if the End parameter stops too slowly the Delay doesn’t do anything you can see.

9524_delaysplineeffector2.c4d.zip

[Brian Jones]

the Delay will only work with Mograph stuff, cloners/fracture object not with SplineWrap – if you cloned the circle along the b-spline using a Spline Effector you could toss the Cloner into a Loft and get the same result as the extrude and spline wrap but now the Delay would work.

9521_delaysplineeffector.c4d.zip

[Brian Jones]

you want to use Flat mapping for the image but because the front face of the box is flat to the viewer (and the texture axis) that part of the image (the center bit) can stay actual size but the two sides, being at an angle to the viewer need to be scaled thinner so it fits from the front but the flat projection makes it the correct width when viewed from the side – just have to work out the scale size based on the ratio of the size it needs to be (whatever the width of the face on the back side is) to you want (2.719)…

9517_boxmap.zip that’s wrong since I don’t know the actual width of the box but that’s the idea

[Brian Jones]

it looks like xParticles 3.5 might be able to do this (I don’t know for sure, I’m not a beta-tester for 3.5 and there are only examples posted here https://3.x-particles.com/x-particles-3-5-release-date-30th-november/ maybe the particles falloff functionality would do what you want