[Steve Bentley]

You might be stuck. When some of these 3D providers transcode the models to another format (maya to C4D for instance) they don’t always ensure that the textures, or even the hierarchies remain intact. It could also be that a different 3D package maps them differently and the transcode can’t accommodate that mapping.

What you can try though is to make sure the folder where the textures reside is in the list of texture folders C4D knows (that list is in the C4D preferences and you can customize it).

You can also try making a folder called “tex” and putting is right next to the C4D file on your drive and put all the textures in it. Then fire up that file and see what happens.

Finally, it might be a naming convention. Check that the names C4D is asking for match what the name of the texture is. Often the textures are old or coming from a country who has different characters on their keyboards and the naming gets changed to accommodate a different OS, or substitutions are made to replace characters that are not allowed.

[Steve Bentley]

Jim is exactly right.
Think of it less as emitting particles and instead as the rocket simply leaves them behind as it moves faster and faster forward.
I would leave the birth rate at a constant higher level. With rockets it’s usually full-on until the tank is empty – in fact the solid boosters usually can’t be controlled or even turned off.
The bonus with a much higher output level is that you get that lovely exhaust maelstrom before the rocket moves because the birth rate of the particles is the same as when its moving, but because the rocket isn’t moving you get huge billows building up around it. Have a look at static engine tests from NASA.

For rockets we normally use a number of emitters.
One for a flame element where the size of the particles diminishes over time and changes color over time.
One for the cloud element, where the particle size increases dramatically over time and those particles spawn children that also increase in size. These also roll quite a bit as the convection and the jet exhaust start them turning. The rolling also amps up the illusion of volume (go look at the Columbia Pictures logo at the start of a film – those clouds are just a bunch of flat stills that rotate but they sure look fluffy). Also add in some air density for these ones – they shoot out fast but then the air brings them to a slow roll pretty quickly.
Another emitter sends out streaks that create detail in the flame trail and fade over time.
The final one is some smoke or dirtying element. It works like the clouds but is thin and dark and sooty. This one can be heavy handed and we see this over-done in B movies or TV shows with missile trails etc. Use some finesse here.

BUT- if you are using a volumetric shader – start small and work your way up. It doesn’t take many particles to build up to a dense cloud and one that is much larger than the area you were expecting to fill.

[Steve Bentley]

If that’s the look you are after, wouldn’t a better starting point be the actual project for that movie? That’s a videoHive template file you can buy. All the layering and effects are spread out for you in the project so you can see how it was done. From there you can alter it to suit your needs or just using it as a teaching tool and then create your own from scratch.
(I am not affiliated with VH)

[Steve Bentley]

What about for PC cntrl-backslash? (I assume Command backslash on the Mac) backslash is the one above the return key. That will maximize the main interface window or the timeline to whatever monitor those panels are occupying, pulling it back from half offscreen.

[Steve Bentley]

A spline deformer might also do the trick – you can get the curve you want from the controlling spline fed into the deformer.
You can also enter an equation either to control a spline or to control a deformer.
What you describe is “exponential” or depending on the values: logarithmic.

[Steve Bentley]

Keep in mind too a snake’s tongue is crazy fast. Most of it is going to be a blur. You could get the animation right and then compress the key frames in the time line so that it lasts only a fraction of a second. Make sure to use Physical renderer for a really good motion blur or render out with a motion blur channel that you can apply in post with a motion blur effect that will accept a motion blur channel.

[Steve Bentley]

An Omni light to light up the car headlight reflector, lens and whats immediately around the light fixture and a spot light to shine on what you want to light up down the road and to create the beam(if you want to see that).
The spot lite should have the car parts excluded from the lights project tab.

The problem with GI is that everyone hits that button first before learning how to light things. Try turning GI off in the render settings and get your basic lighting down. Then you can turn it back on for that extra kiss of realism. The great things about lighting things properly and rendering vs using GI to render, is the render times are sooooo much faster.

[Steve Bentley]

This may be an artifact from Sketch and Toon (artifacts are common with S&T) but often when you have a perfectly flat object, the reflection it produces is from one pixel on the reflected world or sphere. A small move of either the object, the camera or the reflecting object will produce drastic changes in the reflection. Try adding a little bump from a very large noise and see if that fixes it. Settings like: global size of the noise set to 1000 and the bump strength set to 2 usually do the trick.
It might also be the top layer of the monitor being at the same level as a lower layer, so they bounce back and forth as the system tries to figure out which should be on top.

[Steve Bentley]

While you are making the lightspeed tunnel effect in 2D, you might want to make a version of the light speed effect on a flat plain, so that all the streaks run the same direction. Render that out as a movie and then you can wrap that as a texture around a tube that is used for a reflection object (and if you want a GI object ) so that the X wing will reflect and be lit by whats around it. You will also need a few other lights but thats probably the easiest way.
You could also make that light tunnel in C4D and skip AE altogether so that both Xwing and tunnel are true 3D objects you can send your camera down.

[Steve Bentley]

Not really – I mean yes you can do that but you can turn a normal running bit of animation into slowmo in C4D just by rendering it with a higher frame rate in the render settings “output” dialogue.