Cerbera

Yeah I was going to make the same points as Dave above. These guys are often properly stitched up by last minute changes and immutable arbitrary deadlines - that sort of thing makes it almost inevitable that will not be enough time to finish stuff properly, so I think the bits mentioned are primarily suffering from that rather than lack of skill or interest in getting things perfect... CBR

Lovely Maxon case study here on Lucas Cuenca who works for DNEG who created a lot of the character / VFX work on the latest Venom film. Full article here. Amazing work all round I'd say, and some particularly rewarding eye candy shots in this... CBR

In the soft body tags turn on 'Use' above margin, and set a suitable value. Also, collision mode is less accurate than it should be because both meshes are moving yet are set to Static Mesh Collision Mode. Moving Mesh will give more accurate, albeit slightly slower to preview results. Just a quick note about sharing files - there was no need for that download to be 200 MB. Empty caches before saving files to upload, and we don't need textures to answer a dynamics problem ! 🙂 CBR

We'll be needing more information than that... Which version of what software created the Alembic would be a start, and what you used within that software to create the animation ! Also, which version of Unreal, which version of Alembic export, and ideally the file itself, so somebody else can try it ! CBR

Nice setup ! Lathe FTW ! CBR

It is a dynamic simulation so it is going to be losing energy with every contact it makes even with those settings, and theoretically zero friction; that is sort of intrinsic to its main aim / function, so there may be no way to eliminate it completely without adding energy into the system. I suspect an XP only method would be preferable here, but I am not the best person to speculate what that might be. CBR

Please complete your profile so we know which version you are working with. Yep, when working in 3D and with transparent materials we always have to consider what the inside surfaces are doing, and making things out of discreet meshes under a cloner isn't the best way to do this if a contiguous surface is what you need. The Volume builder is the only way of cheating that, without rebuilding it properly over your existing model via retopology, or re-thinking the whole modelling method and process of creating the shape, not that either of those methods are difficult with such a simple cylindrical form. I would have thought circle splines within a Loft object might be the best way of creating this in a way that stays parametric. Or maybe, because it's a radial form could be easiest made with a profile spline and a Lathe... CBR

Yes. You can keyframe the enable checkbox in the cloth tag's basic tab. CBR

Well those are amazing ! Excellent work ! CBR

That does not exist in the new simulation system. CBR

You could stop at the relevant frame, do current state to object, and then delete the dynamics tag from the result ? CBR

I don't think there is a way to do that specifically. Even RS uses scene rather than render values, for reasons I don't understand. I am told the best person to advise on this is Beppe at Octane Support ! He is always very helpful in working out these problems. CBR

Users should be grateful that people as knowledgeable and generous / comprehensive with their help as @Chester Featherbottom are available and willing to assist. As far as I can see he said something speculative in passing about new users typically missing the point of Object Mode (which 2 them immediately do underneath the post !), and massive offence was taken for no reason at all that I can see. Next time there is a question from that user I too will think twice before I help lest I inadvertently ignite such unjustified fires... CBR

Definitely not normal behaviour. I have multiple instances of Cinema open all day and night for weeks at a time without issue. Hopefully support can get to the root of your problem there. I will resist the urge to say 'bet it's a Mac thing' 😉 CBR

Oh yes, definitely no need to get the horrible booles out 😉 But whatever gets the job done in the end hey ?! CBR

Yep my bad - not explaining my own terminology (nor do I consider myself Yoda, but the smiley icon is broken* and Yoda is not !) By 'manual extrude' I mean first regular extrude with caps, and if that doesn't work then a ZERO extrude followed by a NORMAL MOVE can sometimes work on a mesh that has been incorrectly thickened by auto-extrude methods like Cloth Surface etc. We should point out that often it ALSO doesn't work in rescuing these things. So, if NONE of that works, then our only recourse is to manually model the thickness in, which will require some alteration of the main object axis to the position shown (via Axis center Dialogue, rather than Mode, and aligning to 'selected edge' for example) allowing you to ctrl-scale each 'side' in parallel to itself if you see what I mean, via (in my case below) the red axis band.... You would repeat that move the other side, and then Stitch'nSew between them, and add some bottom caps with Close Poly Hole and some manual connecting to create this, hopefully your intended result.... Nope - it's doing that twisting-out thing that Cloth Surface does when it can't keep the angles parallel. To see this more conclusively turn the cloth thickness amount way up and you'll see how the thickness diverts and twists away from the corners in the original surface. CBR * Yikes - most of our smiley icons broke, Sir @Igor !! 🙂 😞 😄

In that last screenshot there are no points selected on the FFD as far as I can see, which would explain why the scale tool does nothing when that object is selected. CBR

Yes you will find that all the tools we have for creating thickness in R25 will fail on such a mesh, for reasons that are very complicated to explain. I would use Manual Extrude to get a result close to what you need, then there will be some further manual adjustment necessary of groups of edges to get the result you are expecting. I have long lobbied Maxon for a proper Shell Tool, and have my hopes that one may appear at some point, but in the meantime we don't have any automatic ways of dealing with these challenging surfaces I'm afraid. CBR

In your second shot you have in fact selected all the points along the centreline of the FFD, which is what you want. That is merely difficult to see because you don't have your HUD setup properly to show you component selection counts etc... Continue by resetting your modelling axis to 0, 0,0 and then use the scale tool to scale from centre of those points. I do specifically explain what spinners are above ! CBR

There are a few different ways of approaching this, but I wouldn't manually model this if there was any automatic way. And of course there are... It could be as simple as inverting a max poly landscape object initially, as I have done quickly below... But my favourite I think would be booling 2 landscapes together to get most of the indentation sorted in one hit whilst keeping both element separately controllable. You can Z-Remesh that afterwards to get decent topology... only a couple of 'traps' in that approach; firstly, Booles work with closed meshes, which Landscape primitives are not, so having altered the parameters and got it look as you need you can make them editable with C and then use Close poly hole to cap in the bases with a giant ngon. (Yes ngons are bad, but this is a fart in a hurricane when booles are involved, so it doesn't matter !) and then booles will work as expected, though they may take a very long time to calculate, and are subject to various anomolies and aberrations that sometimes cause problems. Might be worth checking out Volume Builder as an alternative. In the example below I have booled an inverted landscape into a heavily segmented cube and remeshed the result. For higher detail like in your photo you will need many more polys in both objects than I have below, which can strain remesher and boole routines if not careful, and can lock up your machine if given ridiculous values, so be aware of that ! However that is a very simplistic example to show you a general principal. In all probability a Landscape object will not have enough options in its surface attributes for you to get precisely the shapes and contours you need in the hole. And so I suggest you make one a better way via a 1000 x 1000 Plane with a multi layered noise-driven displacer deformer doing all the height mapping, which let you get a lot more art directable landscaping. BUT, because we need a solid object, we might as well displace a cube instead (high segment values in XZ only), and use a field falloff so we get a solid bool-able object at the end. As far as which noises and combinations of layers and effects give the nicest terrains, there is a good Eric Smit tutorial on that here. When finished making those you just need to Current State to Object the mesh to bake down the displacer and you have a boolable mesh hopefully... Other approaches might include doing the whole landscape, including the hole, with material displacement where you can use sub-poly displacement via the material to get even more resolution and detail. Or using Voronoi Fracture to actually crumble away part of a solid. After that is mainly about scattering a few rocks and bit of debris around the perimeter (scatter tool / cloner etc) to generally enhance the crater-like look... CBR

Nonetheless the information you are being given is correct ! If you want scale numbers to stick when you enter them in co-ords manager you have to be in Object mode. In Model mode the transform is applied, but the scale correctly reverts to 1 because that is the new true size of the object at the new 100% scale. CBR

Ah Ok, you have the wrong thing selected - the object, not the FFD. Select the FFD and then the points you want to change within that rather than directly on the model as you are doing now... However, even when you have the right points selected, the axis will still not be in the centre, because you have previously moved it elsewhere using the modelling axis attributes, which are currently like so... Reset X, Y and Z to 0 (by right clicking the spinners - the little arrows that appear when you hover over the value) and you'll be scaling from centre again. CBR

Yeah, tricky one that. I am still thinking about it also ! 🙂 CBR

Also - hold control subtracts from selection as shift adds to it ! CBR

Yeah, after a while you get a feel for which flows are going to work and give you the right transitions, but even now I still find I am wrong the first time occasionally. I guess it's the knowing what to change to fix it that is where the real XP comes in... mainly it's all about where you put the 5 point poles and making sure they are conducive rather than obstructive to the transition(s). This becomes more complex when there is more than 1 transition going on in the same area, or where these subtleties are difficult to see. Of course it is very hard to massively accurately match curves if you don't have ideal reference, or the physical object, and so far we have just 1 usable front view from OP and have to rather eyeball the rest... CBR