Cerbera

Contrary to previous advice I can't recommend ZRM for this. Yes it produces beautiful quads, but it knows nothing of character edge flow, and it's a bit random chance if the result is useful or not for animation ! Usually it is not I have to say... Ben's advice is good. Edge flow change nearer armpit, otherwise decent ! Because the body is 'not very toned' (to the point where we could almost call it a blob !) you don't need to follow the flow of any underlying muscles, or even the man-boobs (!), just get the edge flow right where the arms join the body. CBR

UV unwrapping a cylinder is very easy in that is already mostly done for you when you create the primitive ! All you have to do is make it editable, pop to UV Edit mode, make sure you have the object and its UV tag selected, go into poly mode, select all, find the UV Packing tab, and do a 5% spacing auto-pack using Bounding Box mode to get a map that looks like this... Then just grab a screenshot of the UV canvas, paste that into your 2D photo editor, and use that to line up your textures.

Unless it has to unroll in an animation, or the camera is literally inches away from it in a still shot, that is the sort of model that is best done mainly with textures I'd say. So you need to model a main cylinder (with enough geo to support hi res displacement on the ends) and possibly the label, but arguably even that could be done with textures ! Once you have your cylinder you would UV unwrap it into 3 islands, the ends and the main wrap, and then use displacement maps you have previously made using photos of the actual object to get the wrinkles in the flat bit and the concentric patterns on the ends. The other approach is to model it manually, which certainly can be done if you are prepared to spend some time wrangling splines. If I had to model this I would get a photo of one end (front-on) and make a spline that described the unique shape of the spirals in that end, then I would get a copy of that and use them both in a Loft object under cloth thickness to get the whole length of the object. Displacer deformers, possibly in a planar mode, would then get you the rest of the way. Wrinkling would still be done with textures, or via the smoothing deformer / magnet technique. Here's a very rough one I threw together to demonstrate the general principal... CBR

Yes, particularly the fact that it is now a feasible choice for production asset modelling in top quality productions like this shows just how much Cinema's modelling toolset has come on over the last few years - it really is quite formidable now - Maxon have listened, and mostly caught up where they needed to, giving us the sort of everyday tools we used to have to turn to plugins to supplement. Of course there are still gaps, but I am encouraged to see that in every area they catch up, they usually do better than all the competition - Pyro, and in modelling, the Symmetry Modes being a good example of that recently. CBR

Not that I am aware of I'm afraid... CBR

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