[Brian Jones]

any texture applied to a parent object (null or not) will apply to the children unless the any of the children have a texture on them, that allows for a blanket texture on many objects but some can be special and have their own. In your case it wipes out what you are looking to do.
You can simply apply the same texture to both the map and the background (a setup like the example video) but you can’t get that shadow effect where the countries lift off the background (2:13-ish). *edit* unless you can cut the bottom surface with the spline (that I assume) is the basis for the map and use Selection tags *edit*
You can apply a texture to a light (gobo) and that will give you the shadow if that’s part of what you need. That depends on the strength of the lights and what your actual alpha movie is like.

13566_gobotrial.c4d.zip

[Brian Jones]

I did a few tests here. Frame 582 (because that’s where the file you sent is sitting, it doesn’t match your render example, not that that matters) takes:
– 4:01 to render 1920×1080 as is GI with GI Samples set to Med
– 1:09 to render with no GI (but looks significantly different)
– 2:42 to render with GI with GI Samples set to Low with no real difference to the look
– 2:10 to render with GI with GI Samples Low and Discrete Area Sampling and Discrete Sky Sampling turned off
all of those times without bitmapbw.jpg which it asks about every render but that’s bump in the glass so the numbers should hold, so it looks like you can almost half your render times by changing your GI settings.

[Brian Jones]

‘Preparing’ takes into account dynamics and particles, hair and anything else that needs to be calculated frame by frame to reach the frame you are at accurately, but Cmnd-R just renders whatever is in the screen regardless of accuracy (also if SubD is being used it will use the Editor setting not the Renderer setting in the SubD object etc). It’s a fairly common thing that catches many, they work away in the preview window and think everything is setup the way they want and then do a full render to find it doesn’t look the same. Maybe that is happening here, if not we might have to see the scene file.
If you have Dynamics etc that can be cached so what you see in the frame is accurate all the time and that part of the ‘preparing’ will go away. So what might be in front of the camera when the real render happens? Another common problem is the camera being behind a wall that didn’t show in the preview but does in the actual render etc. etc. etc.

[Brian Jones]

that should just be Render Settings/Output – set the width and height to be whatever you want up to the max of the version of C4D you have (that 128000 pixels in both directions with R20)

[Brian Jones]

the looping undulations can be done with a Displacer deformer (or Displacement in a material) with a noise as the shader for displacement with a non-zero Animation speed and a Loop Period set to the number of seconds you want it to loop in.

Yeah, no control with Cel Renderer on the line width, Sketch and Toon will give you line width control but it’s harder to get the lines to be stable with those low angles (but that just may be my lack of experience with S&T in the last while).
As an aside you get control of lines and solid line with Redshift’s Wireframe node but I don’t expect you have that.

[Brian Jones]

ok this is the general form, and only one way to do it. Not necessarily what you want but it’s adaptable.

13557_softbodypapertrial.c4d.zip

The Wind object is set to Aerodynamics Wind which is only one of three choices, it requires using Lift in the SoftBody tag Forces tab (the other two, Acceleration and Force do not) and makes the paper float down more naturally so it will spread wherever – that can be changed by changing the rotations added by the random tag to get a better arrangement and you could also lower the Lift in the softBody tag to let it fall tighter the increase it after it settles to let the wind have more effect when it starts.
I animated the wind and it’s falloff to allow it all to fall then blow away, once again, totally changeable.
No matter what else, the paper pieces can’t be intersecting with each other at the start like with the cloth simulation (or it ‘explodes’ or paper sticks together at the start) but that means when they fall on each other they don’t intersect there either. To fix that I added a Push Apart effector to move them apart.
Some settings in Project/Dynamics/Expert needed changing
– Collision Margin needed to be much smaller since the default is 1 cm but your paper is small at 15cm x 7 cm so if the collision margin is 1 cm there’s a big gap between pieces laying on each other
– and Scale (right below Collision Margin) needed to be reduced since the small scale of the paper pieces meant the paper was all just dropping through the floor (it’s just something that has to be done with the Bullet dynamics engine, the help says
“This is the factor by which the Cinema 4D units of measure will be reinterpreted in the bullet engine. Simply follow this rule of thumb:
If you have objects flying through your scene that are 100 Cinema 4D units in size, leave the Scale value set to 100cm. If the objects are 1000 units in size set the Scale value to 1000cm.
This value only has to be modified if objects start behaving strangely, i.e., if it comes to faulty calculations.”

[Brian Jones]

got to go right now I’ll post an example later.

[Brian Jones]

that’s going to be hard or impossible to solve with Cloth since it’s not easy to solve for collisions with other cloth and it’s slow to solve for collisions with itself. Softbodies would be much easier, do you have a C4D version with Dynamics?

[Brian Jones]

how did the hole get made? What version of C4D (are the points that were at the corners of the polys still there)? If the points are still there use them and the poly pen to recreate them. Otherwise maybe use that inner layer and Split a matching set of polys off that and Scale it out if the inside is as close a match as it looks… *edit* why the inner layer I ask myself, it just looks obvious through the hole… Because it looks like a lathe you should be able to select a matching set of polys somewhere around the object (on the outer layer) and rotate them into place. *edit*
Or maybe a set of Circle splines matched to the edges with the same number of points as the lathe has circular subdivisions and use that as the base for the poly pen…

[Brian Jones]

Project/Dynamics/Expert increase Steps Per Frame and Maximum Solver Iterations Per Step

In the Dynamics tag on the window parts decrease Collision/Collision Noise to 0%, decrease bounce, possibly increase the Friction

Search in the Help for “The Party’s Over” that should get you to the Dynamics Tip and Tricks section where they talk about ways to remove energy from the dynamics simulation