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Check out Puget Systems online and look at what they use for their rendering machines. You can also configure custom machines to see what goes together. You don't have to buy a machine through them, although they're pretty good. But they do a lot of testing on the parts they've chosen to use, and it might provide you more information to base your decision.

Looks like there is an issue with the triangle mesh option in the collider tag. Use convex hull or box. And if you can try to keep the "thickness" higher. It is used in the collision calculation and larger values make it more robust. Between rigid body objects this won't lead to a gap. In only adds to the gaps between rigid body objects and collider objects. And: Avoid initial setups with intersections of collision shapes. If you have a stack of stuff with all objects sitting flush on top of each other and the bottom one intersects with the floor collider, the fist execution will have a collision resolution that propagates through the whole stack. You can start we a relaxed state with a bit of a gap and let them fall into the stack via the simulation. Once they have come to a stable rest you can set that as the new initial state for the simulation.

From the get go, the character was created specifically for the the tutorial however, due to a pretty tight deadline I decided to get everything modelled and rendered first, as they were eager for the finished piece to design the cover, went back afterwards and deconstructed it and did the write up.

What would I advise a young artist to do vis a vis a future where AI will increasingly compete for a larger and larger share of people's time and attention? Number one. AI is already alive in the sense that it is never going away and it will forever hereafter compete for people's time and attention. The important thing to note about it is that it does not and will not ever need facilitators or human shepherds to steer its future direction or influence. Rather, how people collectively respond to it will determine where it goes and where its influence ends. AI will eliminate the need for many different kinds of jobs that exist today. On a massive scale. This societal upheaval and the resulting population of unemployed persons will result in many looking to make themselves employable by studying and looking for jobs in AI, but AI itself doesn't have nearly any need to employ humans. Its strength comes from mining all of human digital history and a feedback loop with how all of humanity responds to it. It has no need for employees and there won't be jobs requiring people who know how to use it. Everyone will both know it and know how to use it by its very ubiquitousness. Thus, it's very likely that the very idea of work itself will have to change. All we humans can do in response is to foster and develop the innately human advantages we have as humans that AI can never fully possess. Mobility and dexterity for starters, but also the power to physically, materially and spiritually comfort and support one another. AI will probably make a lot of beautiful music, but AI will never be able to sing through your vocal cords, or those of the persons you love; make your body dance in rhythm, spoon feed a baby, or paint a landscape through human eyes on canvas using real paints and pigments. It may inspire us, but it cannot animate us. So to an artist of the future I would suggest to focus artistic energies on non AI things that animate and move you and others. Figuring out exactly what that is will be art in itself, but forget digital arts for now and focus on traditional human arts like drawing, painting, singing, dancing, gymnastics, acting, tilling the soil, etc. Beautiful and artistic synergies will surely arise between humans and AI, but only between AI and those who are good at non AI things. Artists in the future won't make names for themselves by being good at AI, or using AI, or shepherding AI, but rather by being good at things AI can never do. With the exception of an IT job or similar, put the notion of making a living with AI or having some influence on it or through it out of your mind: AI doesn't need humans or humanity except in the collective sense, but it will never be able to satisfy human desire for what is real.

I accidentially used the standard transform, use the Transform 2D node for better results.

This is a bare bones setup to transform selected UV polygons UV Rotator 01.c4d

Yes, that theory holds water, unlike the balls themselves 😉 So here, in this fully parametric setup, we have 2 cylinders, a smaller one doing the top 4 holes, and then a larger one providing the 2 rows of 8 underneath that. These are all variously offset radial cloners using a target effector on all 3 to make the cylinders point down Z at the centre of the sphere. Those 3 cloners are then given Y symmetry to get the other half, and dumped wholesale in a Connect where they can be used as operand B in a Boolean Set in 'A without B' mode. If we set cylinder and (standard type) sphere to atypically high segmentation (64 and 192 correspondingly in my example above) then we get perfect spherical representation and no visible faceting without further help. Live remeshing (ZRM mode), which is an option that can be deployed above all this, can actually have negative visual effect here, as it can compromise a) the look (no phong tag on remeshed objects by default) and b) inconsistency in edge distribution around the holes which can lead to visible artefacts you then have to work to fix. For those reasons I was getting cleaner results (though less toplogically sound) without remeshing. We mustn't forget that 99.9% of clients don't give 2 shits what the mesh looks like anyway, as long as it's fine in render... Lastly we can bevel the hole edges a suitably tiny amount if we need to, which I like to do on a CStO of the main setup using a selection tag (U,N / Select All, Store Selection) for additional realism; they may be sharp, but not infinitely so. Lastly we should consider that these balls are made out of weak, insubstantial plastic, and get twatted about, meaning their likelihood of remaining perfectly spherical is... low. So should we wish to show that too we can pop a crafty displacer (large scale perlin noise) or an FFD (for more directly art directable wonkiness) in with our parametric setup, or, as I would prefer, under the copy of it I made later (avoids constant remesh recalculation if you use it)... CBR

Use transform geometry node. As mentioned, geometry by itself is not transformed at all, think of it as simply always sitting at 0,0,0 with no rotation or scaling applied. Transformations are applied by matrix which is position, scale and rotation alltogether. clone_transform_geo.c4d