[Brian Jones]

[Joseph M. Morgan] “The main question then will be… can I make grass with the alpha so I have areas of grass, rather than a fuzzy surface. “

absolutely, put your alpha map in the Length channel of the hair material.

To make grass …well, what kind of grass… for quickie lawnish grass (and a place to start) drop in a plane Add Hair – make it green and green with green/green-blue Specular, in the Length channel add your alpha, make the Thickness be 5 bottom, 5 top and Variation of 2, add Bend and/or Curl play with the values. From there there are many possibilities it just depends on the look you want.

[Brian Jones]

another possibility is to put one of the star maps found here https://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/stars.html on a sphere or Sky Object

[Brian Jones]

bhodinut was a texture/material plugin set which was absorbed into C4D long ago. You can probably finish the tutorial, just look for the shader you want minus the ‘bhodinut’. When you are adding a shader to a channel they are in the main menu and the Effects submenu mostly, I think.

[Brian Jones]

no problem

[Brian Jones]

can you post the scene and textures? There’s more than one way to do this and you don’t necessarily need to mix textures

[Brian Jones]

alpha channel sees everything in your scene and makes a mask for it – white for ‘object there’ black for no object, it sounds like you have nothing but ‘object there’. Assuming there are things behind the object you are trying to separate you have to either

– turn them off and render only the object you want with alpha

– use an Object Buffer – to the object you want to separate out add a Compositing tag and in it’s Object Buffer tab check one of the Enable Buffer’s. Render as a Multi-Pass and whatever channels you want for the image but be sure to enable the Object Buffer channel. Save as a Photoshop (PSD). The object buffer should show in the Channels tab in Photoshop where it has the name ‘Object Buffer (x)’ not ‘Alpha’ but it can be used the same way

[Brian Jones]

Won’t work that way but you can do symmetry first then add hair later to the symmetry object and if will add hair to both parts

[Brian Jones]

thick snow probably is best to model in. If you just want color and/or slight bumpiness it can be done with a material. Try using the falloff shader to give ‘snow’ only on the tops of things.
There is a snowy mountain tutorial by Cactus Dan here https://library.creativecow.net/articles/libisch_dan/moonlight_mountain.php
it uses 7.3 so the bhodinut shaders it uses have long been absorbed and lost the bhodinut part of the name but it’s still there (Material editor/File/Shader/Nukei). He uses the Falloff shader here so even if it’s not what you are after it should give you a way to think about. (same thing could be done with a Layer in the shader instead of Nukei)

[Brian Jones]

You don’t sound like you have too many polys but if you have a bunch of booleans that will slow things down. You could make the booleans editable or (probably better in the long run) learn how to do it without booleans.
Radar dishes are simple and would be better as a spline in a LatheNurb (only one of many ways to do it) and that would be much better on the speed than a boolean.
If you have your windows already outlined then just extrude inward rather than bool, if the windows are just placed in a blank wall with the bool then get used to the knife tool and learn how to cut the windows first then extrude.
Booleans are great at times but are resource intensive and you can easily over do it.

[Brian Jones]

the helix and circle should work. Try different Plane settings for the circle and/or check/uncheck Parallel Movement in the SweepNurbs settings.