[Brian Jones]

The render mode for the PyroCluster material has to be atmospheric and the ray bias needs to be small enough to work. The smaller the ray bias the longer the render though (at least in my tests) so it can be worth your while to find the highest ray bias that works for your scene.

[Brian Jones]

select the keyframes and hit the delete key

[Brian Jones]

Haven’t seen the movies but it sounds like a volumetric light thing

[Brian Jones]

check out the hardware guide here
https://www.3dfluff.com/mash/stuff.htm

[Brian Jones]

‘ribbon like object’? Can you post it? Other than that it should be a poly object

[Brian Jones]

I’ve seen good numbers (published) with both cards, if the advice on Mash’s hardware guide here https://www.3dfluff.com/mash/stuff.htm is still true I would go with the X800

[Brian Jones]

go to https://www.maxon.net/~deepshade/ and dl some textures to see how it can be done (there is more than one way).

Check out the the Danel texture (in the File/Shader menu of the materials manager)

[Brian Jones]

https://www.toolfarm.com/tutorials/c4d-toonsketch.html

[Brian Jones]

change the Intermediate Points of the text spline to increase the splines internal subdivision. Try the modes and tweek the value for subdivisions (number for Natural and Uniform and angle for Adaptive)

[Brian Jones]

Without seeing the object it sounds like you might want to animate the growth of a SweepNurb instead.