[Steve Bentley]

Hey Marco,
What format type are you rendering to?

[Steve Bentley]

Slaps forehead. Of course! Thanks Brian. Saving my sanity as usual.

[Steve Bentley]

And check that the “Speed” of the noise is set to 0.

[Steve Bentley]

Did C4D save a backup while it was rendering perhaps? Of late I’ve been finding I’ll do a test render in the viewport, turn to another machine while it cooks, but when I return, no render. C4D wipes the render cache when it saves a timed back up. So it did render but I wasn’t quick enough to catch it before the timed save.

[Steve Bentley]

I have a memory of this (with a comma between) but I might be smoking something.
I don’t think there is. If there was you would be able to select two selection sets and then drag them both into the selection area of the material attribute at the same time and that doesn’t work. That double drag would create the proper syntax in the selection area but instead you get a verboten icon.

[Steve Bentley]

The problem is for something to be transparent there has to be a background to be seen through the glass. You can have that background be “not seen by camera” with a composting tag, and it will still show up inside the glass sphere (with Index of Refraction, if you have that set) but won’t show up outside the sphere or in the alpha. Reflections will also be captured in the RGB of the sphere.

You can fake a glass alpha with a fresnel effect in the transparency (or alpha) channel of a material and that can generate an alpha that gives a see through fall-off like a glass ball would but does not generate a background, a background inside the ball or the distortion from index of refraction. But you could then generate all that inside your compositor especially if all you are doing is spheres.

[Steve Bentley]

You have to render with an alpha. And you have to be sure that the format you are rendering to can support an alpha. This will not generate any “glass” distortion in AE where you can see through the object but it will isolate the objects properly.
As for it looking crappy in cineware, I’m pretty sure you are only seeing what the C4D viewport could generate in AE (for positioning) and you either have to tell cineware to render that frame to see its full glory or let AE render the whole thing.

[Steve Bentley]

Second question first: If you are using a selection or selection set to map the second material on top of the first, the “blend” at the edges will only be as fine as your mesh. There is a spot at the edges of the selection where the texture will be there for one “row” of polys and then not there the next. So it can be a pretty hard cut off where the texture ends. You can either use a soft edge alpha to map the overlapping texture on top of the underneath texture or you can use Body Paint to paint the image on to a UV map and feather it that way.

As for mapping; if you can get a straight on view of the area you want to map to, you can drag the second texture to the object in the object manager, then “set selection” for the polys you have manually selected and name that selection. Then put that name in the second material tag’s attributes under “selection”. That will restrict that second material to that set of polys. (alternatively you can drag the material to that selected set of polys and cinema will do all the naming and restricting for you). Then right click on the material tag and choose “fit to region” and draw a bounding box around those selected polys (this is why you need a good straight on view as you can only drag a rectangle). That will size the second material to those polys. You can now tweak that sizing with the mapping attributes in the material attributes.
To my knowledge there is no “Fit to selection” which I’ve never understood – I think that would be super useful.

You can also just do a flat mapping and manually position, rotate and size the texture to the entire object (no selection sets) and then the edge of the second material is perfect (or as perfect as its alpha will allow)

I wasn’t sure how one copy and pasted a texture to an object so I was not able to see the results you were seeing with the replacing texture.

[Steve Bentley]

You can also use a point morph tag (character menu) on the original unbent object, and use the sculpt tools to edit the original or manually by vertex or the tools in the mesh menu to alter it once its bent and keep the original mesh live and the bend live. And you can animate the point morph, the object and the bend all at the same time.
Make sure to select “tangential” from the Mixing attribute of the tag (really, after all this time there’s still this typo in C4D?) and “post deformers” in the point morph tag so that you are working on the bent shape in position and not the original geometry.

[Steve Bentley]

Usually what jacks the file size up is the key frames. Even a high mesh model doesn’t do as much to bloat a file as thousands of keyframes might. These can come from various places: a complex and long camera track can do it to you, using the set keyframes button on a multi object model can set the keyframes (needed or not) down through the object stack really multiplying the number of keyframes in the scene.

In the model category, baked deformation subD info can really add up the memory cost. As can baked or internally stored cache info for say fabric sims.

But don’t discount those textures – while they are stored externally and don’t add to the file size, when rendering, those all have to fit into memory to do their job efficiently.

Having more parametric objects can also add to the size. C4D has to keep all the elements down through the parametric chain sorted so they can remain “live” and changeable, that takes more memory (usually) than just having the final object – a bool of 50 objects is bigger in ram than the final collapsed editable object. Baking some of this in or making these objects editable can reduce that.
Mograph and TP can also jack the size depending on how you are using it.