[Steve Bentley]

See link. Is this what you were trying to do?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VlPntMoSY26hMtfl1AgUvncUJOVmHyhY/view?usp=sharing

[Steve Bentley]

What do you mean by “hemispheres share the same center”?

The fall off should gradually affect the clones as it is animated across them.

[Steve Bentley]

Possible reasons why:

– You have no lights in your scene AND your default light is turned off in the render settings AND you have no emissive textures.

– Your camera isn’t pointed where you though it was.

– all your objects are set to not render (that lower stop light is set to red) but still visible in the viewport (top green or grey stop light). Don’t forget that a parent set to not render will not let its children render either – parent nulls are famous for this.

– You are using a 3rd party render engine – you need to use its IPR to do your test renders and not the main viewport. (or using the wrong kind of camera with a third party render engine)

– You have another view set to the render view (I don’t think this would matter but it couldn’t hurt to check)

– Your scene is so small or so large and your camera is so close or so far away and the project settings are set to tiny or huge that your camera is clipping. Or your camera clipping in the Details tab of the camera is set too high or low.

– something is being worked out and will take a while so nothing is showing up, but will if you leave it run. (things like subdivisions on displacement surfaces or calculating dynamics on high mesh objects can take a while before something starts to happen)

Does it render if you don’t use the interactive region?

You could try throwing you C4D prefs out. (you can find the path to them at the bottom of the preferences window) – C4D will generate a new one then next time it starts.

[Steve Bentley]

This is correct – the idea is that you can close all projects but not quit C4D. It’s not so much that it’s a new project staring back at you, it’s more an unpopulated interface now that all the assets have been removed with the close function.

[Steve Bentley]

Did you put the plain effector them first and then apply the linear field to the plane effector’s fall off?

You could also use a radial field and animate that around the “circle” of hemispheres instead of the change being a wipe across the “circle”.

[Steve Bentley]

I also just realized what you were describing with the “noisy or wild edge”. This may be the Straight Alpha type at work. The Straight alpha choice is like a cookie cutter for your image. But if it were a true cookie cutter it would get a little bit of the black around the object due to anti aliasing and then you get that bad 70’s blue screen fringe. So instead it extends the colors of the objects edge pixels that, without the alpha applied, can look pretty psychedelic. Apply the alpha and matte it over something and all will be fine because the extended color insanity becomes the antialiasing at the edges so every edge pixel has the color of your object and none of the background you rendered it on (usually black).

[Steve Bentley]

Also remember to choose an appropriate mesh style to simulate with. If the object is changing shape over time (or the force or object it intersects with ) an “Animated Mesh” is often better than Static mesh or Automatic.

[Steve Bentley]

That converter would be C4D itself – C4D has a robust export system (under the file menu) Each export has its own settings in the preferences or you can access those at time of export in the Save dialog.

For things like SubD surfaces its best to make them editable (the C key) to get them back to polys. For deformations you can right click on the object that is being deformed and select “Current State to Object” And this will make a copy with the deformation baked in. For other exotic things like particles and tracers, you can export an Alembic file While you may not get traced particles out of the tracer you will get splines that trace the path traveled. There are few objects like the Matrix and particles that don’t generate any geometry (so they won’t export as geo) unless you assign some geometry to each particle. And remember to make all parametric objects editable ( a standard Cube in C4D may not export the way you think depending on format, because its not actually polys yet)

A couple of things to keep in mind. Y is up in C4D but Y is not always up in every package. Not all packages work in cm so when exporting you can tell C4D to “convert” to another metric. Like if you have been working in cm’s because you forgot to change it to mm, you can tell C4D you meant every cm to be a mm.

Also keep in mind that C4D is not a watertight or “manifold” modeler. It is just as happy trying to render a normal that is facing the wrong way or a cylinder end cap that is not sealed to the tube (all C4D parametric cylinders were like this prior to R21 and spheres weren’t sealed at the poles). So sending this to a 3D printer might not work because its not water tight. So check your models. Try optimizing them (Mesh menu) and this will often tie together points that lie on the same vertex but aren’t actually joined. And check those normals are all pointing out. Often Boolean operations will reverse normals. C4D is also not a solid modeller so many objects are just skin deep with nothing inside. A plane or sheet has no thickness. If you need it to have, use a cloth object on it and add some thickness.

You can also output you model without the SubD surface on it and have the user add their own. This will make the models smaller and they user can decide how much geo they want the model to have. Just make sure to recommend which type of SubD you worked with when modelling (Catmul or CatmulClark or Linear etc.)

You can also connect separate objects into one with either the Connect object (and then make it editable) or using the connect objects in the Mesh menu. This way your model will have one part instead of hundreds.

Using selection tags or vertex maps can translate to some export formats so the textures map properly when multiple textures are used on a single mesh.

Finally, C4D is not compliant with all formats you might think it should be. It will export a 3D studio file (.3DS) but not a 3D studio Max even though these formats are closely related and from the same application (although different ages of the program)

I would stay away from DXF because it’s a poorly defined standard and not all programs expect it the same way. A DXF can be a flat 2 line drawing can be a full 3D mesh.

[Steve Bentley]

The easiest is going to be adding a plane effector and putting the rotation amount in that effector. This will affect all clones at the same time. But then put a linear field in the falloff tab of the Plain Effector. Now you can drag that linear field (and key frame it) to slowly “reveal” the rotation you asked for in the Plain effector.

Align the Linear field so the arrows point in the direction you want to reveal.

[Steve Bentley]

Are you rendering GPU or CPU? If GPU could your GPU simply be full?

What output format are you using and what render engine?