[Brian Jones]

deformers work either as the child of an object or at the same level as an object in a group (usually in a null)

so, either

Subdivision Surface
-Extrude
–star-base
—deformer

or

Null
-deformer
-Subdivision Surface
–Extrude
—star-base

[Brian Jones]

ah, you can animate the noise but you can’t move the noise (at least not in the viewport) in a Layer. I don’t see anything about Layer limitations in the help. Put a report into Maxon, either they don’t know or there’s a reason

[Brian Jones]

can you post the shader (even in an otherwise empty file) it would interesting to see what breaks it – I just tried a fairly simple layer shader

[Brian Jones]

in the material’s Editor tab make sure Animate Preview is checked – the apparent scale of the noise is wrong (very similar to the scale problems if you turn Options/Noises off) but it does animate

[Brian Jones]

Priority of the XPresso is too low (early) it’s getting evaluated first – it’s moving the tag to where the string is at the calculation phase of the frame – then the balloon gets moved by the dynamics later in the calculation phase, then it renders so the tag is always a frame behind. If you increase the Xpresso priority to a higher value (calculates later) than the dynamics the xpression will calculate after the dynamics and follow the balloon. Dynamics priority is Generators +400 so the XPresso has to be Generators +401 or higher.

[Brian Jones]

in the Motion Tracker objects settings click on Create Background Object at the bottom of the Footage settings

[Brian Jones]

the scene file must have cloners in it and at least one shader effector. They need to be removed. Most plugin objects or tags usually look like an empty null and/or have a question mark on them

[Brian Jones]

Cloners (and the effectors for them) are only available in C4D Broadcast and C4D Studio

[Brian Jones]

try changing the helix’s Intermediate Points to Uniform from the default Adaptive

[Brian Jones]

you can’t clone the Trail and have it behave normally in a single frame render in the Picture Viewer it’s ok in the editor and it’s ok if you render a full sequence in the Picture Viewer. Something to do with the XPTrail object but it says in the help there can only be one trail per particle so maybe it’s related to that. Simplified test 9441_xperror2.c4d.zip

Not seeing any troubles with the colors but I took all the extra materials off – with the pink and blue having extra materials and all those materials trying to use the same poly selections it’s just asking for trouble. Pink and blue should be like yellow, only two materials.