[Brian Jones]

Can’t see anything, I would try taking the metaballs out into their own scene to simplify and see if anything becomes obvious.

[Brian Jones]

ahh, the Bend and the Cloth both want to do calculations on the points. The results can be nasty. If you were unrolling the cloth horizontally you could turn off the bend once it’s unrolled and let the cloth take over (or turn cloth on at that point) and it would drop. But since you are unrolling vertically and the cloth is meant to hit the floor, you can’t turn off the bend and let the cloth take over because once you turn off the bend the cloth reverts to straight in a single frame and the cloth can’t deal with that.

The only solution I see (someone else may know something better) is to use the bend to roll the cloth, do a Current State to Object to freeze that. Then scale inwards with a soft selection to get the cloth not touching itself in the roll, then apply cloth tags to that with Self Collision turned on and let the cloth engine unroll it. Like this but if you need to have the roll be smooth like if it was being done with a bend deformer it would need something different.

[Brian Jones]

Can’t guess without knowing how it’s set up. Can you post it?

[Brian Jones]

Floor object doesn’t have any ‘real’ geometry (points, ploys, edges and normals) so it can’t be used as a collider but you can place a plane where the floor is (just under the floor or use a compositing tag on the plane and uncheck “Seen by Camera”)

[Brian Jones]

That’s what the Start Tab is for in the Rigid Body Dynamics Tag.

“The ‘v’ settings define the starting velocity of the rigid body. The ‘w’ settings set the angular velocity (rotation). ‘F’ defines a force that is exerted during the first frame of the dynamics animation. The values you enter for ‘I’ will define the torque applied during the first frame of the dynamics animation.”

So you can set a starting speed and let it run. Like this.

[Brian Jones]

Net Render is great for animations, somewhat more work for stills (but still faster). You have to be aware that different CPU’s with different FPU’s should not be mixed. From the manual….

“Inaccurate Calculations

One common feature of heterogeneous (unlike) networks is that they usually involve computers with FPUs (floating point units) that work to varying degrees of mathematical accuracy. This can lead to rendering inconsistencies such as particle streams (as with the previous CINEMA 4D particle system) or with Clothilde / HAIR being calculated in very different positions on different machines. Nobody can predict when these inaccuracies will arise, nor will anyone be able to tell you how severe the deviations will be.

However, CINEMA 4D solves this problem (at least with particles) by allowing you to bake the particle stream prior to rendering. This only works when using CINEMA 4D’s own particle system (not for Thinking Particles) or Clothilde / HAIR. Nevertheless, we recommend you always make a quick preview before commiting the final render.”

So with you having a PPC either it would be best to get PPC’s for a farm or use the PPC only as the net render server but not as a renderer and get a number of machines using the same chip to run the renders.

But the first thing I would do is to think about the PPC, assuming the 2.5Ghz quad you are probably getting Cinebench scores something like 2000 for CBSingle and 7000 CBMultiple. My 8-core 2.8 intel Mac gets 3200 CBSingle and 19000 for CBMultiple so you could (depending on what it is you are rendering) probably do better than chopping your render time in half. Otherwise, if you can get your hands on a number of G5 machines that would be the thing to do with Net Render.

[Brian Jones]

Functions Transfer is the easiest but just for completeness…. Paste Identical ‘Suppose there are two cylinders in the scene. You select one of the cylinders, select its Radius and Height parameters in the Attribute manager and choose Copy to copy the two values. If you then select the other cylinder and choose Paste Identical, the two values will be pasted to the same parameters — Height and Radius — regardless of which parameters are currently selected. This is in contrast to the Paste command, which pastes to the selected parameters.’

Which allows you to select any or all parameters common to objects and paste them all at once to others.

[Brian Jones]

A single poly can’t bend, there has to be more than one segment (or if you made it editable then subdivide)

[Brian Jones]

Camera Mapping is a possibility, you need one camera to ‘project’ the texture then another to render from

[Brian Jones]

No icon by default, I think. Window/Content Browser or shift-F8