[Sam Treadway]

Block out the basic shapes while at a much lower subdivision level and gradually increase subdivision levels to detail the geometry in place.
Since your current subdivision level is only 3 I think you are starting with a mesh that is already too dense. Try starting with the least number of polygons needed to achieve the basic blocking. If you are in R20 then use also have volume builder and volume messier at your disposal so you can use a series of low polygon objects to block out the overall form and then build a volume from that to sculpt on.

[Sam Treadway]

My guess is you are using the Takes system and the object you are trying to keyframe is not included in the overrides list for the current take.
Either include the object by dragging into the list, make the main take active or turn on “Auto Take”.

[Sam Treadway]

The new Mac Pro doesn’t ship with it but there is a space available and a few configurations from Promise will be available around the time the Mac Pro ships:
https://www.promise.com/us/Promotion/PegasusStorage

[Sam Treadway]

Here’s a really quick test setup in under 10 minutes from the above post:

https://i.imgur.com/IPk4QIv.gifv

View post on imgur.com

[Sam Treadway]

1. What would be the best way to create that looping undulating effect?
On the noise shader of the Displacer, set the animation speed to something like .3 and set the loop period to the total time in seconds.
If the fps of the project is set to 30, then a loop period of 1 will loop over 30 frames. You will render frames 0 through 29 (frames 0 and 30 are identical).

2. How to get the lines extruded on top? I’ve tried using the cel renderer effect, but I can’t seem to control the width of the lines.
One way is to use the bevel deformer. This coupled with fields will allow for some really interesting controls.

First, to get the same look I’d start with a sphere set to “Icosahedron” as the type. Set the radius to something large like 1000 and the number of segments to 200. Then make it edible and select a square patch from the top view, invert the selection and delete.

Assign two materials to the object. For the material that will represent the edges, make sure the selection field of the texture tag is left empty. For the other material representing the polygons, select all the polygons and create a selection tag and drag that tag into the texture tag’s selection field.

Now, create a bevel deformer. (the values below are a good starting point)
Set the bevel mode to: chamfer
offset: .25
subdivision: 0
corner n-gons: off
phong break rounding: off

Make the displacer a child of the object mesh object.
Make the bevel deformer a sibling of the mesh object by placing both under a null.

[Sam Treadway]

Look in the layer manager.
On the R1_Geo and R1_helperGroups layers, turn ON “Visible in Manager”

[Sam Treadway]

A guess:
Duplicate the 3 objects, combine the duplicates and remove tags. Then use VAMP to transfer the weights.

[Sam Treadway]

Think of the exporting to the alembic format the same way you think about exporting a video.
With video, larger resolutions, deeper color and a longer timeline will result in a larger files sizes.
Each frame in a video can be considered a unique image but with certain compression algorithms, data for spatial and temporal redundancies is stored efficiently which can reduce file size.

With alembic you are baking out each frame (or subframe) without any dependencies / deformers, etc…a point cache with extra details.
You can think of it as a single file where each frame contains version or independent representation of the mesh.
So the denser the mesh and the more frames you export, the larger the file.

One way to reduce the file size is by increasing the frame steps.
The motion between frame steps can be interpolated.

To test it yourself, do two exports.
Set the start and end frames the same for each and then set the frame step to 1 on the first export and set it to 10 or 20 on the next export.
When you import set the “Interpolation” option in the alembic object to on.

With the motion in your scene you can probably get away with a frame step as high as 15 or 20. The motion may not be exactly the same as the frames between exported frames are interpolated.

[Sam Treadway]

Add a connect object to the scene and immediately turn off “Weld” on the connect object
In the “Objects” field, link to the null containing all the petals.
With that connect object selected, export to alembic and make sure “Selection Only” is checked.

[Sam Treadway]

Create a cube and size it, then hide it from the viewport and renders.
Add a shrink wrap deformer as a child of your mesh.
Reference the cube you just created as the target object.
Set the mode to ‘target axis’.