[Brian Jones]

you shouldn’t try to replicate an Illustrator gradient with control of color and alpha in the same node. In C4D you have a separate alpha channel – to solve what I think you are saying you just have the same color but make it fade with a gradient (white to black) in the Alpha channel (or in the transparency channel it depends on if you want the surface to have speculars even when being see-thru)

[Brian Jones]

a way to trim to a shape would be to use a boole. In C4D and Blender it’s the same sort of process, add a cylinder with the obj import and do an Intersect boole. That should give you the part of the landscape inside the cylinder. Extrude that and you get a top and bottom that are identical, flatten the bottom (scale to 0 in Y or Z depending). That’s a start anyway. Pretty slow with that many polys you might want to Polyreduce/Decimate before the Boole, that depends on the detail possible in production (and the physical size of the result)

[Brian Jones]

here’s a quick trial not much effort, blurred the images a touch (it’s easy to blur too much with that image) to smooth the pits, the model is by Remco van der Meer from the PixelLab freebies page.

[Brian Jones]

there are two ways to make the pits smaller one is to increase the number of tiles in your Material tag but to avoid seams you should stay with even numbered tiles or to increase the number of dots in the image. Or you can double the size of the canvas in the original image then copied the image layer 3 times and arrange the layers to make a seamless image at double the size.
Then do a Polar to Rectangular on that.

all of that works on the upper dome since it’s a hemisphere and basically it’s the “Mercator projection” type of distortion (from earth global maps) that you need. On the lower body of the barbeque it would be a lot simpler since it’s really close to a cylinder so cylindrical projection with the image without Polar to Rectangular would work fairly well.

[Brian Jones]

using a Polar to Rectangular filter (in PS or some such) on the image gives pretty good results with just UVW mapping – not perfect but better.

[Brian Jones]

are you using an image texture (not procedural noises)? Can you post the image file?

[Brian Jones]

you want Takes not the render queue (check the Help out). For your example, you have the cameras set up already you just need to add a separate Render Setting for separate output names. Then use the Takes system to make different takes for each camera and corresponding render setting then render the takes you want.

A simple example
14183_taketest.c4d.zip

Takes Manager is accessed via the tab in the upper-right (under Object manager)

[Brian Jones]

that’s pretty funky, any two look about like you would expect but add the third and jiggle…
If you put the noise’s Space to UV (2D) you can use all three Shader effectors but it’s a very predictable motion since the three noises are identical (at the moment), if you then change each noise’s seed so it’s unique it looks ok

[Brian Jones]

can you post the C4D file for the demo movie you made?

[Brian Jones]

it’s hard to know without seeing it but physics has hinges etc.