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Check the tool for yourself here http://imaginaire.cc/gaugan360/ This is my test: I love it. No more voxel cloud painting and countless hours of sky renderings with Vue for a background. Share your own tests below.

I am trying to help with this, but waiting on a few colleagues to confirm or deny some stuff before I say anything definite ! My initial thought is that's a 'no', but I'd hate to definitively say that and then find there was a way I didn't know about. What you should be able to do is use external references so the extra objects in theory don't have to exist in the same file, but I had some issues with my tests of it so hesitant to recommend that either ! CBR

I do a lot of 3D print modeling and there is absolutely no reason this can't be modeled in C4D and also no reason to use booleans ever for anything.

MOI 3D is a nurbs based modeler. It's written by the guy that originally created 'Rhino 3D'. You might think of it as a much simpler, but still very powerful, version of Rhino or Fusion 360. It also has a great polygon mesher so you can export the nurbs based models as polys with a lot of control. I use it quite a bit for CAD / engineering type modelling / visualisation work. There are many users on the forum creating models for 3D printing very successfully. There's an active and very helpful forum at: https://moi3d.com/forum/ Looking for a quick demo of the sort of work you're doing, here is a video from 2015 - and it's been much improved since then - but it gives you an idea of the sort of thing it can do very easily - and this video is probably realtime - or close to it - BTW : ) Here's another good intro:

A modeling job like this just screams MOI3D to me TBH.

I am hesitant to jump into this one not having a 3D printer myself, and I wouldn't presume that I know anything you don't about this, but I was given to understand that as long as the mesh is watertight it doesn't matter what the topology is doing, short of actual error-state polygons that can't be interpreted as a viable surface properly by the slicer software. In the absence of any pics or the file, f I had to predict what might be going wrong I would suspect the booleans first, especially if they are layered. But again, I am sure you know every trick I do to try and stop booles failing, and I imagine you can't get sharp enough results out of the volume builder, so it is difficult to know what else to suggest here. Bizarrely the thing that first occurs to me is to remesh it in Zbrush where the extended functionality of Z-remesher might be able to hold on to your hard edges in a way it currently can't in Cinema ? CBR

I use Cinema 4D for modeling 3D printed molds etc. for years now. For me a key element is to keep as many parts parametric as possible. Bools are knwon to be problematic since there is not always a working solution, but if you can adjust subdivisions there is basically always a way to make it work. In general it helps a lot to keep subdivisions between booled objects on a similar scale. Roughly equal polygon sizes are the goal here. I also try to create bevels parametrically using the bevel deformer, again keeping as much as possible of the model parametric.

I have limited experience with this, I’ve been modelling some plush toys that are being printed into 6 inch figures, although the they were fairly simple in design/detail compared to what you’ve been tasked with, I think some things to consider are, wall thickness. There’s a minimum thickness that should be adhered to, this may very depending on which printer and material you’re using, if the model you’re printing isn’t just a single solid piece. making sure there’s no holes or gaps in the mesh. Everything needs to be air tight, as you’ve seen with your current model, fairly decent topology so the slicing software can do it’s job and sort it into layers etc.

And another thing I find that is starting to nag! When I render a scene (which usually contains Xref characters) it will start rendering relatively fast. If I run out of time and have to stop the render and come back to it, say from half way through, it can take up to 10 minutes preparing before it starts to render. I thought this had something to do with hair but my scene doesn't contain hair. When I just render a single frame it takes no time at all or when I switch SDS off it renders with hardly any processing - anyone else experienced this? This is all rendering using Redshift BTW and I am not on the very latest version.