[Steve Bentley]

I’m still not crystal on the need for this but here’s a thought.
Why not have the artist doing the textures (or is that you?) only work in grayscale and then all textures in C4d would really just be alphas with whatever color you want on the object in the color channel in the material (or another image)
Unless all the objects are simply textured with solid colors I think there is so much to texture mapping (tiling, UV mapping, orientation, mip settings, all the different channels) I’m not sure that a pipeline can be simplified to this degree.
Can you expand on why you would want to approach it this way?

[Steve Bentley]

This is a pretty complex animation to “start” with so keep that in mind that there isn’t going to be a “button” that solves this – animating things is a lengthy process.

Here are a few things that might help:
To have something move with dynamic forces you need to have a dynamics tag on the object. The paper will never be attracted to the attractor without a dynamics tag. Also remember that positional hand animation can fight with the dynamics forces. Its not a no-no but it can complicate things.
If you add a turbulence force you can get and attractor to look like wind. Think of turbulence as eddies in the attraction force.
Whatever the object is the paper runs into at the end has to have a dynamics tag too but with the setting set to static or off (it still has to be enabled though) – you have to have an object that can stop the paper moving.

Its good you can break this into three scenes because that way you can use the best technique for each scene.

Your set up for the spline and bend deformers should be like this: A null parent then your deformers and your paper as children of the null. I keep my deformers right under the null (i’m not sure if this is required, I just do it out of habit), with the paper at the bottom of all the children.
If you have a texture on the paper you will have to use a Stick texture tag and hit record when the paper is flat and the texture looks right, otherwise it will smear when the deformers start working.

The paper you animate as though in a straight line along the straight base spline. When you turn on the spline deformer, the paper will follow and bend along the target spline which has all the curves and loops.
I’ve never been a fan of the bend deformer – its just clunky. But you have to orient it the right way, you should size it to the object, and you should turn on keep y length otherwise the paper will stretch when curved.
Remember that you can set a deformer to a bend shape but have the object outside the bend and then pass the object through the deformer space, (straight-bent-straight again) or you can push the deformer, already bent, across the paper while it’s moving and the paper will act like a worm moving through a tube shaped like the deformers shape.
You can move the paper independently of the deformer and move the null so that the paper and deformers move together.

Keep in mind using the spline deformer AND the dynamics probably will be too difficult to get right – two systems kind of fighting. You could easily and I recommend using bend or twist deformers WITH the dynamics though. The dynamics tag would have to be on the parent null so that the object and the deformers travel together.

If you want to upload your project I can have a look at your progress.

[Steve Bentley]

Answering in reverse:
The forces in c4d are just that forces – c4d doesn’t care which one you use or how many you combine, it just takes directional cues (vectors) and intensity (vectors again) from the forces you add and combines them to get the overall.. you guessed it… vector for the motion.
So a gravity force in the downward direction will combine with a sideways wind force to give you a slanting motion.

Gravity in C4d is an overall direction – so all objects no matter how close to the gravity object will all travel parallel to each other in one direction. Same goes for the wind (excluding turbulence)
Attractor can act like gravity but to a single point. So getting the wind to blow your paper to a specific spot might be hard to aim, while having the paper be attracted to a single point will be more fruitful – notice I didn’t say more accurate. If the object already has motion, that will be added in to the attraction force and, like a spacecraft being attracted to a planet’s point source gravity well, the object may sling shot around the attraction point. But if you just place a static object with a dynamics tag that also has the attractor as a force in its list (or at the very least doesn’t exclude the attractor force) it will move right to the attractor every time. Keep in mind that most of the forces are accelerations so as time goes on the object will move faster and faster towards the attraction point.

Now that I see your storyboard, you might be better putting the paper inside a spline deformer. You would have a straight spline as your base and then a curved one with loops etc for the “to” spline. When you move the paper through the “field” that is the deformer (and yes the deformer and splines would run right from the bulletin board to the text on the wall) it will deform as dictated by the spline, like a worm going through a tube.
There are other ways but they involve xpresso and are more complex. You might also add the other spline deformer in the list to get some of the curls.

I think you would have to hand animate the paper peeling off the wall at the start though. So it would probably be a bend deformer or two (these can add up just like the forces) that make this happen or another smaller spline deformer, and these deformers would travel with the paper and be deformed along with the paper inside the outer spline deformer. These would also let you deform the paper on it’s journey adding to the warp the spline deformer is imparting, making it less “perfect” and more fluid.

You can do this with wind but it’s tough to get right when you have a look you want to achieve and even harder when there is a targe to hit.

Make sure you have plenty of subdivisions in your paper object so it’s supple and you should probably add a cloth tag just to give it a little thickness (this too will add subD’s). If you use a plane to start with, make sure to polygonalize it first.

[Steve Bentley]

In the prefs or the viewport settings (depending on your version) there is a color management setting for the viewport. This may be set to something weird. It really should be set to Linear. But will often be set to SRGB. or adobe RGB. These can change your lighting or the general darkness of a scene. If you are viewing on a CRT by all means use one of these but who does that these days. Srgb and adobe rgb are ONLY made for CRT and can vary from screen to screen. Linear will also give you more latitude to tweak color in post.

Another problem area is that when you render at something other than 8bits your systems color management may not have the right look up table (LUT) to convert the 16bits your monitor can’t handle to the 8 bits it can and in the process things look a little screwy.

While you found the button to turn off the open gl in the render settings there is another one in the preferences under the edit menu. Turn it off there too.
It may be that your GFX cards open GL just doesn’t jive with the flavor of c4D’s open GL. While there are standards, unfortunately there are a bunch of them – kinda like the 27 versions of HD

[Steve Bentley]

Whats your hard drive situation? Chocked full? Check the AE prefs too and make sure the scratch drive is the one you think it is. Lots of ram is great but AE, even after all these years, accesses very little of it. Adobe products love scratch drives and the ram hardly ever gets offloaded to the vid card.
Check your preview settings in the preview menu pallette – as a fellow long time user i”m always amazed at the settings an upgrade comes in with. I hardly ever use the preview pallet but with never versions I’ve had to kick AE into doing things the way I want them done.

[Steve Bentley]

I think what’s happening is that you are missing the mask and double clicking the layer which takes you to the sub layer or precomp that each layer has (except solids).
When you hover over a mask that is in free form transform mode (the 8 corner and side dots) you have to hit the mask line exactly and wait until the cursor turns from the usual arrow into a stemmless arrow (kind of a chevron). Only then can you double click the mask to get to the individual points. You can also just click on the mask in your layer’s attributes (hit M to reveal it) and that should give you access to the individual points.

If you double click with just the straight cursor, you will go into the sub comp for that layer – you can still mask there but you have to turn off the render button at the bottom right of the comp window – that button shows what the layer will look like with whatever effect you are playing with – in your case a mask.
So it will black out the area you are trying to see while masking unless you turn this off. But you won’t get to see the layer in context with all your other layers. So you should always mask layers in your main comp.

[Steve Bentley]

In C4d prefs you can turn off open gl – try that – some things are ok with open gl and some things aren’t in R16, and some gfx engines are ok with C4D’s version of OGL and some aren’t.
But brian is right – kind of an old proc and a weak gfx solution for both windows 10 and C4d – and an old c4d for a new windows.
We haven’t made the leap yet to 10 for these kinds of reasons. Windows 10 is expecting a kicking gfx card for this kind of work, in fact it’s counting on it. Win 10 is too busy waiting for you to get gorilla arm from doing your 3D work (or a spread sheet) with a touch screen.

[Steve Bentley]

You can trim a layer (or all of them) just to get them same length, so your auto sequencing works and then put the length back to where it was.
I’m still not clear on the problem so I’ll just offer some solutions and maybe one will help.
You can:
Grab all keyframes from many layers and move as a cluster.
You can Select multiple keyframes and option/drag to stretch and shrink the overal length of the grouping (I’ve purposely messed up my key asignments so that might be cntrl for a normal set up).
You can select multiple attributes and open the curve editor and increase or decrese values at multiple times across multiple keyframes all together
Copy and paste keyframes at different times – move the time marker incrmentally and the first keyframe of the ones in the clipboard will appear at that time with the rest layed out beyond as per the original.

[Steve Bentley]

We’re working one right now (see pic) and it was done with one of the Nitro plug ins (you can do everything they can do in cinema without nitro4D products, we just like how quick we can crack stuff with them)
This was done with a capsule underneath that had a random effector on it set to points.
its not as angley as yours but our outer facets are not dynamic (but could be)

11598_cracks.jpg.zip

[Steve Bentley]

If you have the Thrausi plug in that should be easy. Just fracture the plane (or cube) and then push a sphere up through it. The plane and the sphere will need a dynamics tag (or better tell Thrausi to put one on each by telling it that the sphere is static and the plane is dynamic.
For more random cracking put a random effector on the pusher sphere and tell it to shift the points randomly so you get a spikey sphere.