[Brian Jones]

change the Priority of the Constraint tags on the spheres to Generators -499 so the clamp happens before the Metaball gets to run

[Brian Jones]

have you tried using the same proximal settings in the Color channel or a shader to see where the Proximal will actually be mapped to?

[Brian Jones]

I’d have to see the scene file

[Brian Jones]

Vornoi creates a ‘bubble’ around each generation point and the result is where all the bubbles intersect, but the intersections are all flat not curved/rounded. Are you talking about the general shape of the pieces and you would like to see rougher surface where they meet?

[Brian Jones]

it’s in the Project Settings – there is a check box near the bottom Linear Workflow – read about it in the help – side effects would be all your textures will change somewhat and I don’t even know if it will make it possible to do what you want but there is a different nicer fade to the gradient alphas when I stop Linear Workflow

[Brian Jones]

I get a similar result in the Corona renderer. – FWIW I found a huge difference in Physical in how the gradient fades off if you turn Linear off…

[Brian Jones]

viewport performance is a combo of graphics card speed and single core CPU speed. Your video card is not real strong and the AMD’s before the Ryzens are pretty weak even though the single core Ghz is not bad on paper. I don’t know if memory could be affecting that. Short of an upgrade you can change the viewport settings so you don’t see the textures at all until you render (turn off antialiasing in the viewport, go to Constant Shading (or Hidden Lines) etc).

[Brian Jones]

faster computer is the quick answer after that – are you talking about editing (viewport) performance or rendering performance?

[Brian Jones]

well the Matrix is basically a cloner that produces points in space rather than clones (which clones/particles/etc can be attached to or generated from etc) so the same rules apply to my understanding.
The other possibility is to have particles being generated (from 6 emitters (or one emitter using 6 points (perhaps a Matrix) as the origins)) – with no rotation and a life span which gives the right ‘drop’ before they disappear you could get something visually identical

[Brian Jones]

how long does the sequence have to maintain?
-There are probably more ways but the ones that come to mind are just make the cloner a lot taller in Y and use a Plain effector to move the clone group down over time but only have your 6×10 grid visible by using an effector with a Box Falloff to control seeing only the one group of clones. 11315_cascadingclones1.c4d.zip
-or have 6 splines side by side, connect them into one spline with 6 segments and clone along them and just offset to get your cascade 11316_cascadingclones2.c4d.zip

the splines one is easier but clones just pop inane disappear the invisible clones one can have the clones fade in/out depending on how the falloff is set up ( I suppose you could do that with the splines one with an effector to control visibility there too…)