[Brian Jones]

in the material tag (once you place the material on the object) there is a setting in the Editor tab ‘Texture Preview Size’ it’s default value is Default and you can increase the values to see if it gets sharper. I don’t know the details but the help says the default is dependent on the graphics card so depending on what yours is your results may vary. Or at least as I read it. The background object is unaffected by that setting so it will always only be affected by the quality of the image. If you have clear background object the image must be big enough, so try the Texture Preview Size.

[Brian Jones]

it’s pretty easy to get the cameras doing some extreme results. Try tossing the camera and bring in a new one. Maybe post the scene or some screenshots

[Brian Jones]

it looks like some of the stuff here https://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/ – that is really old and won’t work with anything past R15 likely, there is a newer version linked off of C4DCafe but the link is broken (or was when I tried it).
Particles moving on a surface would give the result, either TP or XParticles (much easier) could probably do that.

[Brian Jones]

the objects penetrating are usual with fast moving objects, they can go through an object between the subframe sampling the Dynamics system is doing. It can also help to increase Size Increment in the container’s rigid body tag (if it’s not going to show). In Mode/Project/Dynamics/Expert increase Steps per Frame. I doubled that to 10 and did a size increment on the container of 5 and that stopped it. I had to reduce the Emitter to 150 with the size increment to not over fill the can.
With those settings the objects seemed to settle well but for dynamics that won’t quit search for this “tips and tricks (dynamics)” in the Help. There is a section there down the page “The Party’s Over” that talks about how to stop that sort of thing. It also helps to set Collision Noise to zero everywhere since that adds random energy to keep things looking natural but in a contained sim like that is not usually necessary.

[Brian Jones]

seems to be a bug in the Cel shader or a limitation to how it works, But given that the specular portion (if you turn it on) works on both sides unlike the diffuse I’m going with bug. I’d have to guess no one ever -1 scaled something tried to use Cel then reported it. It also happens if the normals are reversed so scaling -1 must reverse the normals (which makes sense). The usual way to copy something side to side is the symmetry object which does handle it correctly.

[Brian Jones]

do a Current State to Object or maybe try frame 1 not frame 0

[Brian Jones]

which will be fine as long as the clones don’t move

[Brian Jones]

probably have to bake the object then it should work.

[Brian Jones]

????

[Brian Jones]

yeah, 20 made a change, the vertexes of a deleted polygon don’t hang around like in previous versions (so you don’t have to clean them up if you don’t want them).
You can get the old behavior by Shift-Delete-ing. Another thing you can do is to use the Weld tool, select the points you want to weld into one (you could select all of them at the same time) and click to indicate where the weld will happen – at any one of the points or their combined center.