[Steve Bentley]

Sure can – use subsurface scattering shader. You can either put the lights that makes the balloons glow behind or within the ballons themselves. Scale matters as it can be tough to get good noise free results if your scale is too big or too small.
This shader lets light (and you do need a light in the scene for it to work) through the object and glows with the color of the object, the color of the light or another color altogether (like the tips of yoda’s ears – pink glow in green ears when lit from behind with a yellow light)
Be warned though SSS can take mucho render time.
The new Inverse AO is a good alternative to cheat SSS and it’s speedy, and you can sometimes get by with a Fresnel shader if you have simple geometry and not to much camera movement.

[Steve Bentley]

I’ve been itching to try the new pushapart effector in C4d for this kind of application. It should be fairly straightfoward and you can wipe the effect on from one end to the other (planar) or from the outside in (inverse spherical). This would eliminate keyframing each part.
But it might depend on your object stack and the shape of the model in question.

[Steve Bentley]

I doubt they have – but I’ll try it this weekend. We’ve been after Maxon to fix it since version 2.
I came to C4d from Electric Image which had the best/fastest motion blur of any package – even by today’s standards. So that was a pretty important feature we found lacking in C4d. (when they made Monster House in C4d they said they went without motion blur to achieve “a look” – I’ll bet it was more that they ran into the same problems you did)
We’ve used the motion blur pass in AE or the physical renderer (or octane) for so long now I’ve all but given up on the standard render’s blurs. The last time I crossed my fingers and tested was R16 and it was still a problem then. (better than R14 but only when the object was moving, but once the objects stopped… – doing a separate render at the stop point with blur turned off doesn’t fix it by the way – the difference is just to great).
The physical render blur is very very good, and if you have enough cores they do contribute to making the two buckets go faster. You can also set up a render farm so it gives the illusion that there are more buckets in play as each machine adds two more buckets to the brigade. (this shows up in the grayscale gorilla tutorials as their physical renders scream with multiple buckets – at least in Nick’s demos)

[Steve Bentley]

I ran into this a while ago so it may have been updated but I think opacity numbers MUST be whole integers when coming in from an expression. That’s why you can’t manually set something to say 55.5 opacity.
Along with Michael’s suggestion, you can also use .floor and .ceiling methods to clip the decimal off and return the next lowest or next highest whole number.

[Steve Bentley]

It may be too that the vectors are too small coming in from illustrator. While in theory vectors are infinitely scaleable, it seems that if the paths are too small on the illustrator canvas you can only blow them up so much in AE (even with continuously rasterize turned on). So make sure they are a decent size in AI first.

[Steve Bentley]

I haven’t tried this on a mulit mesh obj set of files you get from RF, but you can find the height of a mesh at a specific x,y ground plane coordinate with expresso – we use this to drive cars over variable terrain etc. You can also have a spline follow a terrain contour. So you could have expresso find that y coord point on the mesh for each of the “frames” of the RF mesh sequence and then position your object there.
What I dont’ know is if expresso will freak when it sees an entirely new mesh on each frame.
I’m also wondering if you coudln’t do it with a shader effector and you project a texture mapped dot on the mesh.
In RF you can have a dummy object (think: boat) adhere to the surface of the undulating mesh and then bring that positional data in to C4d for that object.

[Steve Bentley]

Here’s another approach. It all really depends on what your scene looks like.
https://lesterbanks.com/2016/04/position-c4d-dynamics/

[Steve Bentley]

If you just want to see it in the comp, you have to turn motion blur on in two places – on the footage layer itself and up at the top of the timeline window there is a matching icon (two over from the shy icon and one to the left of the motion graph editor button). Turn that on as well and the blur will show up in your comp (assuming that the object is moving or rotating).
That top button is there so you can designate certain layers to be motion blurred in each layer but leave leave the overall effect off when you are working with your comp as it takes longer to process that effect. Think of it as a global motion blur button (but only for layers that have their own motion blur turned on.)
The default settings for rending tells AE to turn on that top button when rendering but it couldn’t hurt to check in your render settings that it is indeed set to on for rendering.
If you want to make the blur more or less, you can adjust the shutter angle in the comp settings window (cmdK or cntrlK) under the advanced tab. The default is 180 degrees which refers to how a motion picture camera used to work (their shutters were circles with a wedge cut out that light in – the wider the wedge/angle the longer the film was exposed and thus a longer blur). So a higher blur would be in the 270 degrees range – but more than that it starts looking unreal, unless that’s what you are after.

[Steve Bentley]

There is a limit to the stretch effect – 9900 %
If you go into prefs you can have a frame fill the comp (its under import) or be any other set length.
You can also enable time remapping on the layer and you can then extend its out point to the end of the comp.

Am I missing something? Time stretching a frame wont make the motion last any longer because on one frame there is no motion.

[Steve Bentley]

The key here is to mimic what the big boys do – have the smart phone show the view through the camera on the phone screen itself (even in wire cage!). This system is all the rage in Hollywood now (pretty much any CG-heavy film after Avatar uses this technique.)
I’m not sure if it saves hours and hours or not. In theory it does but the possibilities it opens up, you find your self working on the moves longer because its so intuitive and pleasurable, and you can get it just so, where before you repeated the phrase -“that’s good enough”.
I don’t know of a commercially available solution for C4D in this field so I would imagine its a marketable project.