[Brian Jones]

if the Axes Scale is set to 0 that would hide them too (Shift-V/Viewport/View)

[Brian Jones]

C4D 18 will show a “reflection” of the Sky (if it’s there) or of a default hdri if it is not – that is just for seeing which objects are reflecting and a preview of what they might look like but it does not render. Your scene doesn’t have anything but what is reflecting in the sphere and it’s reflecting that (the floor and a couple light boxes and one light up top by the look of it). You would want to use a Sky object with an hdri material on it (or an image of some sort usually) or maybe a Physical Sky object.

[Brian Jones]

what was the solution? Just curious….

[Brian Jones]

the bevelling is stopping at the point where the normals of the polys change from inward to outward – the normals should all be facing the same way (outwards is probably best – they should all be orange when selected)

the vertex selected here is really two if you zoom up close, those should be welded together.

the wall of polys visible through the hole isn’t attached to the walls, only the floor and ceiling (I moved it in the picture attached to see what it was attached to). That would stop normal bevelling at that point – it should be removed if you don’t need it or cut and attached if you do need it.

[Brian Jones]

hmmm, nope that doesn’t render – it looks good in the viewport but not render…

edit* oh sure it does, I had the wrong renderer chosen, it works fine in Standard and Physical ***

[Brian Jones]

I don’t know if this is good enough but this is two materials with Multi-Shader one with the backgrounds and one with the images with Alpha not multiplied, just on top.
Random effector to color the clone planes and different settings in the two materials for how the images/color are distributed – it seems to work best with Color – Green and Color – Blue in the background shader’s MultiShader.

11012_randomimagesbackgroundstest.zip

[Brian Jones]

you can’t do a Connect and Delete with parametric objects (in the example case it’s the two Sweeps and the two Extrudes) they have to be made editable first then the resulting poly objects can be connected

[Brian Jones]

The settings with this object set seem really touchy.

11010_thedroppedpiano2.c4d.zip

-Changed the settings in Mode/Project/Dynamics/Expert to Steps per Frame = 5 and Max Iterations per Step = 10
-Changed floor Plane to a poly object from a parametric – I don’t know if that makes a difference at all – and increased it’s poly density a bit
-Reduced bounce of the floor plane
-changed piano parts to be Moving Mesh rather than Automatic – automatic just puts a box around all the parts (or a sphere around spheres) so if the automatic box intersects with other parts (if they are not simple enough) then when the dynamics turns on at impact they will want to explode away from the intersecting bits. *** Note here*** the piano keys are intersecting the piano so to make it more predictable you might want to change the design of the keys. ***
-Increased Angular Damping of the piano parts (that’s in the Force tab)
-reduced Friction in the piano since 200 is way too much usually.

If you have one of the versions of C4D with only the MoDynamics Dynamics then it might be tougher.

[Brian Jones]

stopping overly-dynamic dynamics is done by changing settings in the dynamics tags. It’s very easy to have too much energy in the system. Lower the bounce, increase friction (where appropriate), increase Linear and Angular Damping. There is a good bit in the help in Dynamics/Tips and Tricks/The Party’s Over – it talks about stuff that won’t stay still afterwards but it applies to your situation too. I would think higher Angular Damping on the high speed spinning parts would be a start.

[Brian Jones]

I just imported it into C4D and that’s what it did when placed in an Extrude – the Adobe Illustrator import settings dialog that comes up had Connect Splines checked, I left it that way for the first test, so it came in as one spline and worked right away. I’m using R18 so if you are not perhaps there is a difference in the import… – I just tried with Connect and Group Splines turned off and got a lot of splines which I selected and ran a Connect Objects and Delete on (leaving one spline again) and that works as well so the spline from Illustrator appears to be good, maybe just a change of import is needed