[Brian Jones]

I took a look yesterday and am not going to be able to do a good look again until tonight but what was immediately obvious was there are a Camera and 4 lights inside a Polygon Reduction object, I don’t know if that will affect anything but it’s likely not good practice. Also the Cube (well an editable cube) inside that poly reduction object is already as simple as it can be so the poly reducer is redundant so shouldn’t be there.
The other Polygon Reduction object has a Metaball inside it and that also can’t be good with the constantly changing number of points in the metaball… I would adjust the settings of the metaball and not have a reducer there at all.
Justin is right the size of the metaball divisions for render at .001 is way too small and no wonder there is a huge render delay. You may want to get the look you want using just the metaball settings in the editor then match the render settings (metaball) to that

[Brian Jones]

AR is under the “Cinema 4D Visualize, Broadcast, Studio” chunk of the help – I believe it was there in 15 as well

[Brian Jones]

it’s rare but that sometimes is the fix, copy everything from one project to another, you may not be able to use the original… but you can send files to support to see if they can do anything I think

[Brian Jones]

if you copy/paste all the contents into a new scene does it work?

[Brian Jones]

the Shadow Catcher shader is an Advanced Render thing (well, you can use it with Physical but the alpha channel colours seem backward) it’s in the help here – Reference/Cinema 4D/Cinema 4D Visualize, Broadcast, Studio/Advanced Render/Shadow Catcher

If you turn on Include Lighting in the Shadow Catcher tab it should look better with your scene with multiple lights.

[Brian Jones]

what version of C4D?
What Shadow Catcher? the built in shader or the old plug-in?
Compositing in C4D or AE (or something like it)?
Can you post the scene file ?

[Brian Jones]

doesn’t do that here, what version of C4D?

[Brian Jones]

since you haven’t said I will assume you are trying to use a circle spline swept on a helix spline I will also assume you are trying to use an image of text… Rotate the text image 90° so it’s running up and down rather than left – right that should get it to run along the sweep when applied with a normal UVW applied material (the default), then just adjust the settings (Offset/Tiles U/V).

[Brian Jones]

I’d need more info about what render what the fibres are etc or ideally the scene file itself to look at

[Brian Jones]

I’d check Window/Customization/Customize Commands and search Undo to see if the shortcut is still properly associated with Undo View as a start