[Mdme_sadie]

At this point rather than wasting any more time you should request your client to send you the file in a usable format with optionally an explanation stating that you were unable to successfully convert the file yourself to a usable format due to the fact that Blender was unable to output to well known and standardized file formats correctly (more or less explaining what you have done here, that you tried importing what it produced in multiple applications all with the same disastrous results).

Remember your time is their money on a job, so it’s in both of your interests for them to send you a file that you can in fact read. If you plan on working with this client a lot then you might consider gently guiding them towards using tools that actually work and are production ready or are at least capable of such basic tasks as reasonably consistently correct file-format export for a few of the more common formats.

[Mdme_sadie]

It’s simpy a shader effector on a single cloner. The text is a movie.

[Mdme_sadie]

That’s what the step effector does though, it applies an ever increasing effect based on the index of the clone, just modify the spline to control who it affects the objects from the first to the last.

[Mdme_sadie]

Duplicate the cloner, and set it’s clones down to the lowest number of clones you want, then create a new cloner, place both the other linear cloners inside of it as children, then apply the sound effector to this new cloner, set the clone mode to “Blend” and the number of clones to 1 (well providing you don’t want more that is) and then in the sound effector make it control the “Modify Clone” value.

[Mdme_sadie]

There’s lots of ways, here’s a couple that might get you started off

1) Create your linera cloner
2) Create a tracer tracing your linear cloner and set to connect obejcts
3) Attach your tv to the resulting spline, either using a cloner or just possibly an align to spline tag.

(this is also a good basis for creating basic l-systems, branching effects such as basic trees etc)

Method b:

1) Create a Matrix obejct in linear mode
2) Create a cloner with both your “pods” and your tv in it
3) Add a step effector and set it to “Modify Clone”, then modify the spline in the step effector so that only the last clone is a clone of the tv

[Mdme_sadie]

Certain effectors result in a recalculation on each frame due to their nature, the texture effector is one of them. The cloner itself makes heavy use of cacheing for speed and in general is very fast, often faster than having seperate geometry (compare it to using a TP Geometry object and you’ll find it’s at least twice as fast there, even more so when used to generate geometry from normal particles versus the particles obejct itself generating geometry) however when if an effector requires a full recalculation (such as often the texture effector) this cacheing can then sometimes go to waste, and the effector itself may require some time to evaluate per frame. Either not using a texture effector or making editable/current state to object can result in your scene being faster in this instance. However a large object count will always be slow in Cinema (in most apps come to that), for instance a thousand cubes will be many times slower than just an object with six thousand polygons.