[Brian Jones]

Here’s a test, simplistic train with a loft made from rectangles constrained to the cars for the connector… too simple probably but maybe a direction to go.
Of course real trains don’t rotate around their centers they are locked to the track at the front and back wheels (playing with that now for amusement since I’ve never tried it before) but tracks don’t bend that much either in reality…

[Brian Jones]

earth to my brain….. sorry, I meant SweepNurb not ExtrudeNurb

[Brian Jones]

Try setting the spline’s Intermediate Points to Uniform, that should help with the train and cars separating while moving along the spline.

[Brian Jones]

use a spline with the cross-section shape of your wire then extrude that along a spline with an ExtrudeNurb

[Brian Jones]

Probably there’s a glow rim around the dancer? Try using the Glow post effect (part of the AR module) instead of the Glow channel

[Brian Jones]

What are your Reflection Depth and Ray Depth set to in Render Settings? Maybe Ray Depth is too low?

[Brian Jones]

if the points are generated in a completely predictable fashion (likely) and they are a grid it should be possible to generate a poly ascii file. If you take a cube make it editable, generate a point ascii file and a poly ascii file you can see the point file just shows where they are in space and the poly file just shows which points are used to make a poly. So if you can figure out the regular pattern of of point numbering you should be able to generate your own poly file. Since it’s a million points+ that likely means being able to generate the file with some sort of program or script rather than doing by hand…

[Brian Jones]

I don’t know of a way to automatically do that. In C4D it looks like you need a points ascii file and a poly ascii file to build an object in that way. That makes sense since the program would have to make guesses about which points to use to make any one poly.

What is the object anyway? Can you get it in a different format?

[Brian Jones]

I have 6 Gigs and a Mac which can give more memory to a program (there is a memory thing you can do which does increase the per-program limit of XP (don’t know about Vista) which somebody can describe how to do) and I can get that text to cut out of a cube here. It takes a bit to do the cut but once it’s calculated everything moves smoothly. It is possible but like Randy says it’s a load.

[Brian Jones]

never tried to use it before but a quick look says you can import ascii animation data in the Timeline or ascii point info in the Structure Manager. A quick test and I see you have to put an empty Polygon object in to receive the points and then it just imports the ‘point cloud’ no polys are made you’d have to connect them by hand and with a million points… but maybe wiser heads know more.