[Brian Jones]

The default is to render the current frame but that can be changed in Render Settings/Output where you can change the Frame Range to whatever you need. Or do you already know this and it’s something else?

[Brian Jones]

I say backface because everywhere the color is (red and green) it looks like it’s coming through the translucent plastic not reflecting off the surface – the sole exception is the green on the back support with the slot in it, that looks like it could be backface or reflection. Can’t really tell what’s causing it, can you remove the device and replace it with simple cylinders with the same materials and the same lights? You’d need to Save with Assets as the images used may have something involved.

[Brian Jones]

and green in the image too. All looking like backface showing through the transparency. Definitely a scene file would help.

[Brian Jones]

the ‘close’ edge and ‘far’ edge are not clear but how about the move tool with a soft selection?

[Brian Jones]

it’s the axis handles talked about in originally there but that functionality has gone away somewhere along the line (certainly it’s gone in R20), I never used it that way myself, I always preferred the axis buttons up top. And no with the magnet tool since it doesn’t use the axis (but the buttons do work with the magnet).

[Brian Jones]

it’s the displacement in the material. Displacement in both (why two textures?) is set to Intensity (Centered) which moves the polygons in for the back parts of the texture and out for the white parts. Since the texture appears to be pure black it’s moving all the surfaces inwards and they overlap each other (pass through each other) in the thin bits (the antennae). Just turn off the displacement or if you are going to be putting a displacement map in there just set displacement to Intensity

[Brian Jones]

can you post the scene file?

[Brian Jones]

since they are hand placed in the real world it’s a hard look to emulate. It looks kind of like a voronoi fracture, which can be made editable, then all the separate pieces can be selected, have their polys all selected and run a Dissolve command which will get rid of the inner points and will flatten the pieces some but some roundness will remain. After that there are a couple ways to flatten the resulting single ngon per object but the easiest I know about (there was a flatten plugin around R12 but that’s a long time ago) is to select the poly use the scale tool with Modelling Axis – Axis = Selected and Orientation = Normal but that can’t be run on all at once (even if Per-Object Manipulation is on) so it would have to be done for each piece one by one. If you have a 1000+ faces it would be nasty.

With my test I used a sphere so roundness is hard to defeat but if you got the pieces to align right or if they are small (like on the head piece in the photo) it might work out.

12742_mirrormantest.c4d.zip

probably not the only way as well…

[Brian Jones]

one way is to animate the scaling (or a parameter) over 20 frames then use that in a cloner with a Random effector – Min/Max 0/100 – Random Mode Sorted – Color Mode On (or Effector Color in R20 – not actually necessary but gives visual feedback as you set up as to what will scale first) – and Time Offset greater than 0.
If scaling rather than animating a parameter (like in the example) then Fix Clone in the Cloner should be off – change random seed to taste

12738_clonerandomscaleup.c4d.zip

[Brian Jones]

I looked but coffee’s vnorm doesn’t seem to translate to python’s Vector.Normalize – I don’t know enough to know what’s wrong. I’d try CGTalk as well as there are more scripters there (or seem to be) and while it might be possible in xpresso I’ll bet the coffee node is there because it’s a lot easier that way.