[Brian Jones]

you are using the Sound Effector as a deformer? If so you should be able to bake the speaker to PLA (Point Level Animation) in the Animate layout – Functions/Bake Objects… make sure you check PLA

[Brian Jones]

The Standard and Physical rendering engines are CPU based, they were programmed to use the CPU and would have to be rewritten to use the GPU. The ProRender engine uses GPU, Redshift uses GPU as do a number of other available renderers.

[Brian Jones]

the sign on the back wall is a luminant texture? What happens if you kill reflection/specular in the floor’s material?

[Brian Jones]

I think the MultiInstance can only be used with a Position Source for where the instances will go. And the only difference, as I read it, is that multi-instance makes all the instances a single object a single object (internally) so viewport performance will be quicker compared with Render Instances.

[Brian Jones]

The Help says nothing about melting objects

“Use this tool to scale selected polygons perpendicular to their Normals. Use this tool interactively by dragging left or right within the viewport. You can also drive the tool with numeric input.”

It only scales polys in relation to their normals and with every poly selected it looks a lot like a regular scale. Try it on a standard sphere and you can see the difference with every poly selected. I think it’s most useful for selected islands of polys.

[Brian Jones]

the second image you are partly there. You can use the Length U,V and Offset U,V to place the image where you need it. Or you can use the Texture mode which is a more interactive way to set the LEnght and Offset values (does the same thing really).
Your image can be used as is but for future reference if you have a square image to put down (the disk is length=height) the whole image is easier to work with if it’s square. Your image is obviously a 16×9 image and it ends up with a lot of blank space on either side of the circle in the center and when it gets laid down in C4D it looks squished, you can compensate by making Length U bigger than Length V with this one

[Brian Jones]

what Mapping are you using in the Material tag? It should probably be Flat mapping. You might have to use the Texture mode to line it up

[Brian Jones]

Here’s an attempt, two cloners each with matching sizes of hex objects (cloners set to Random, as long as the cloner’s Seed value remains the identical the random distribution will match). Then added a separate Shader effector for each cloner so the height values are independent.

14208_doubleclonerhexes.c4d.zip

[Brian Jones]

Procedural might be possible with the right code to generate the objects (and I have no idea what it would be or if it’s actually possible outside a plugin or not) but that is way more work than is necessary. Your example image only has 6 different hex combo’s I can see and Jim’s method is exactly what I would be doing. Put them in a cloner set to Iterate, use a Random effector to get random order but then use a random/noise/field to push the inner/outer hexes up and down procedurally as opposed to Jim’s quick test where they appear to be fixed

[Brian Jones]

The sphere should have a Collision tag on it, that will be animatable without having to use follow position etc. For the window you can animate the gravity to turn on at impact or put the window in a frame that is a Collider to hold it until it’s hit