[Mat Mol]

Thanks so much Brian and Adam! It looks like the surface deformer will do the trick. After some poking around, I discovered the reason I couldn’t get a surface deformer to work was because I hadn’t installed the latest update for R18. Patched it up and BAM- surface deformation. Lesson learned

[Mat Mol]

It does seem like the interpolated spline should always pass through the vertices (except for b-splines). I’ll do some more experimenting and report back if I figure out what’s causing the vertices to shift. Thanks for your wisdom Brian!

[Mat Mol]

Try using GPU-Z or a different GPU monitoring program to monitor your GPU frequency and utilization during the benchmark. Laptop CPUs & GPUs have been known to sometimes stay in their power conserving “battery mode” states, even when under load in certain scenarios. And of course installing the latest drivers and updates can often help.

[Mat Mol]

Ah, one thing I should have mentioned: after switching to Uniform Intermediate points, the corners (and the rest of the shape) did stay the same, but only while in point mode. If line/polygon/object mode is selected, or if the scene is rendered, the changes become apparent. Did the project file behave differently on your end, Brian? If so, perhaps I’ll start checking program settings.

[Mat Mol]

Are the vertexes the points where two spline segments join? If so, I believe there are vertexes at the corners. Here is the spline in point mode:

and here is the project file: 11188_map.c4d.zip

I made the map in Illustrator using paths and the appearance panel, then reduced all the lines to simple paths on one layer, then merged the illustrator file into C4D.

[Mat Mol]

So the intermediate spline points solution is helping big time, but it also introduced a new issue which I can’t seem to resolve. When the spline’s intermediate points are set to uniform the object looses some of it’s original shape–it goes from the original shape:

to this:

I’m trying to find a way to anchor the original spline points and then set intermediate points to uniform, so that they work around the anchored points. Is this possible?

[Mat Mol]

What exactly fails when you enable live link? If you do want to use live link, make sure both programs are up to date. As far as learning to work with after effects and cinema 4d, this course provides some good information

https://www.infiniteskills.com/training/learning-maxon-cinema-4d-lite.html

[Mat Mol]

Thanks so much Brian! The splines’ intermediate points was the thing I was missing.

[Mat Mol]

Thanks so much for your reply, Brian! I am using the distance modifier, and I have experimented with custom ranges. Doing this changes the lines somewhat, but for some reason, the outside and middle lines always change thickness at different rates along the Z axis.

Perhaps the strangest thing (and maybe an indication of something I’m missing) is that no combination of settings seems to have any effect on the line thickness of the rectangular outlines (dashed road lines). The only way I’m able to effect them is to bring the max range way down, which cuts them off at a certain distance.

Here’s a link to the project file in case that’s helpful:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B85Q5pZAxubuTjM3OTRkWlY4c00/view?usp=sharing