[Steve Bentley]

Just watch out for the edges – the time warping filters still have trouble with new objects coming in from outside frame.

[Steve Bentley]

What is your raytracing depth set to? There might be so many layers that the rays peter out before they get through all the objects.

[Steve Bentley]

Ok I see what’s happening – the texture is so small the software is interpolating the pixels trying to spread it out over the object. The viewport can be blockier in preview mode than the final render so that makes sense – the blocks you are seeing there is probably the preview and not the actual texture.
What you might have to do if you want that minecraft look from your textures is to blow that texture up with no antialiasing so that you get those squares in the original image. When you think about it – that texture appears to be about 10 or 20 pixels across but you are asking C4D to map it across hundreds of pixels of screen real estate. So naturally there is sub sampling going on.
You could also try turning off anti aliasing in the render settings or changing the texture sampling but I’m afraid edges would start to sparkle, so blowing the texture up beforehand might be the best.

[Steve Bentley]

Will Iclone allow you to import a camera or the camera data from a 3rd party tracker like PFtrack our Boujou? (or even cinema for that matter)

You can usually copy and paste object animation data from one package to another. Sometimes you have to do it channel by channel but for the camera that would only be about 6 or 7 copy and pastes (x,y,z,zoom or lens length, xrot,yrot,zrot). and often you can grab all the keyframes and paste it into something like XL or Word to massage the data – usually its just a formatting issue – too many spaces between values or tabs instead of commas. You can clean that all up easily with search and replace in Word. Sometimes you have to reorient the Y or Z but you can do that in XL just by swapping columns or inverting the order.

The pipeline you suggest should work. I’m not sure where there log jam is. Did iClone support have any insight?

[Steve Bentley]

Is there something in the background for us to see through to? Unless you have an alpha (and even then I’m not sure) if there is nothing in the background the transparency may not show up the way you think it should.
( you can also just put the display tag on the parent and that will filter down through all the other children unless they have their own display tag)

[Steve Bentley]

What does you texture look like? Its hard to tell from the matrial balls – in fact they don’t look low rez at all.
Is the image on the left a viewport render or just the low rez viewport preview?

And just to look big-picture – if, as you say, your textures are going to be low rez, whats the need for octane?

[Steve Bentley]

Have a look at the fresnel shader/settings as a transparent option. With straight transparency you don’t get that build up at the edges or where things overlap. But Fresnel adds this volumetric feel to things.

[Steve Bentley]

I’m just in the middle of something else but I thought I’d clarify a few things if it helps.

If you used a 3D camera tracker the points are indeed in 3D (even though AE is technically only 2.5D – but the tracker data has a full set of 3D dimensions). So those should work in C4D with the exporter.
The exporter should look after the differences in the world space of C4D and AE but in the past we had to manually invert and shuffle some data.
FYI you can copy and paste data back and forth – even write it out to a spreadsheet or text doc – just click on the attribute you want in AE to select all the keyframes and hit copy and you can then paste that data outside of AE in a text doc or spreadsheet or even Word (which is great for removing commas and extra spaces). And then paste that into C4D once it’s been corrected for the upside down Y and shifted Zero point (C4D’s is in the middle of the world whereas AE’s is in the top left corner of the viewport)

Back in the day I tended to use lights to pass position data back and forth. They are treated as a 3D object from the getgo in AE (unlike nulls or solids which are only 2.5D) Also most other apps and plug ins, including bringing data in from C4D, treat lights better than any other object. So try exporting AE lights in your file for guide points to check how the track is doing.

You should have a camera in AE (I didn’t understand the comment about seeing if there were settings in AE). Without a camera its just a 2D viewport. And the camera’s are compatible between the two apps. (you can also export cameras for position markers as they are true 3D as well). Check to make sure that the camera settings in AE match the ones in C4D. And make sure you are viewing the scene in C4D through the matching camera. Keep in mind too the camera you set initially in AE before the track may have changed to better accommodate the track.

The graphix you have in AE won’t export as 3D objects into C4D. You can only export their positions or their “planes” if you export solids. If you need to size something in C4D you can position lights or nulls at key spots (like the four corners of a plane) and get your position and size info in C4D that way.
I haven’t gone this direction for a while – the last few projects have been C4D to AE. But this should be more seamless than you are experiencing., unless of course there is a different method of handling in C4DR19 vs AE2015, and given there were always version issues this is a real possibility.
If you can post this onto the C4D forum on the Cow I’m sure Brian Jones or Jim Scott or Adam Trachtenberg would jump on it as well. And we can all pool our grey cells for you.
I’ll check in again once i’ve got this little last minute change out of the way.

[Steve Bentley]

There is more to a camera than the focal length (mm) setting in some packages. Check the “film” size or aperture size or “film back” size.
There are also a few cad packages that (bewilderingly) have a zoom setting AND a lens length setting. One should affect the other but not in these packages. Check also your angle of view in both AE and the Cad render.

Make sure that the CAD package rendered from the camera view and not some default view. The camera you want might not have been selected as the render camera.

Sometimes it helps to try change the camera in AE so you get close – not for rendering- but just to see what the CAD package should be shooting for and sometimes the problem will stick out when you know what you are trying to hit.

Keep in mind too that in AE higher Y numbers mean “down” and in 3D they mean “up” and that in some CAD packages Z is up and when it is, the Y (which should be the Z) is flipped.

[Steve Bentley]

First lets see if we can shortcut this issue.
In recent versions of AE there is an Export in the file menu for C4d. I don’t remember how far back this functionality went (as in: just a simple export command) so have a look for that first. Unless that’s whats not working for you.

Then there’s the plug in available here:
https://http.maxon.net/pub/r15/updates/CCImporter.zip
However the plug ins were buggy when the versions of C4D and AE didn’t line up so it might not work with your config.

If neither of these work, give a shout and I’ll go look up the method we used to use to bring AE in to C4D. It is possible but for some reason people rarely went in this direction so you may not find a lot of info on the web about going AE->C4d, but we used to do it a lot.