[Brian Jones]

CAD programs are often used but even there you have to watch how you are building it. A buddy of mine is using solid modelers because a solid modeler doesn’t make holes. Or so he says. He says Solidworks is most popular then ProE, Inventor but easiest to use is Fusion 360 for whatever that’s worth.
But really anything that will export STL files is workable and, you should be able to clean your model up in C4D it will just take a bit of work.

[Brian Jones]

With R20, Volume Builder/Volume Mesher was stated as a potential good printing choice as it will take all those meshes and combine them with a clean inside but I don’t know if you will loose detail (haven’t had enough experience with builder/mesher yet), there is at least one demo video which talks about that.
I haven’t printed anything but I do know it’s important to build it the right way from the start but since you are where you are it is possible to clean it up it’s just not one step. Probably cutting with booles and then combining the bits you need with some hand work, tools like Optimize etc.

[Brian Jones]

In the Spline Dynamics tag on the rope spline

Properties: Stiffness 100%, Rubber 5%
Advanced: Steps 9, Iterations 16

values just a guess at what you want, collisions need the steps and iterations higher to stop the rope from penetrating the dog and the stiffness gets stiffer with more steps and iterations too

[Brian Jones]

I don’t think it works for more than a single noise, you can’t layer them up like in yours or pre-calculation would make OGL slow. If you want to see what it’s going to look like you’ll have to render, a Region render or the Interactive Render Region would likely be quickest.
I’d turn off the ambient occlusion and the two bevels to speed things up, set an interactive render region around the head and set the Physical render Sampler to Progressive. That will be about as quick as you can get.

[Brian Jones]

Push the Structural value up higher, I was primarily interested in Flexion since that is the stiffness that seemed most likely to be the problem. Check out the help for more info. And yes the values are what they are, not necessarily ‘real’ but it is a simulation.

[Brian Jones]

the render does look like the viewport to me, animated noise on the head, but likely the scale of the noise is different than you expect. Unless you are referring to something else, in which case a look at the file would be useful.

[Brian Jones]

noises were always different in the viewport than render and you always had to render to get an idea of what it was going to look like but ever since the implementation of Enhanced OpenGL (a while ago) it’s been possible to see how the noises will render. Enhanced OpenGL (Viewport Options menu) was an option at first you could enable if you had a good enough graphics card but now seems to be enabled by default, progress being what it is. What you want is the Noises option just below Enhanced OGL. That should give you a display of what the noises will render like. I don’t know why that’s not enabled by default but it’s there with all the other options.

[Brian Jones]

I don’t think so, to get that to be spherical would involve stretching the polys to get them to match to the reference sphere in my example file.
Do the faces need to be flat? You could just project that texture (the example image, cleaned up I assume) onto a sphere

[Brian Jones]

sphere or hemisphere makes no real difference I think.

[Brian Jones]

the basics were
-working from the Top view to match the drawing
-making a 10 sided n-Side spline
-using the spline Pen tool to draw out the filling/crossing lines
-cutting the splines where necessary to have vertices for the next step
-added a polygon object, deleted the simple poly that gets created and used the Polygon Pen with vertex snapping on to make the flat version of the object
-use Move tool in points mode with Soft Selection on with Falloff set to Dome and Mode set to Center so it pulls the points up in a spherical shape

Spline.7 isn’t really needed it was just an experiment, the x-ray sphere is just to try and hit a spherical shape when pulling up with the Move tool.
While a spherical shape is not reasonably possible with that construction a small lift of the center of the polygon object looks ok, depends on what Sean’s clients are really after