Cerbera

Only my guesses, but I think that could be because that feature is primarily meant to be used with spline sketch to project guide splies directly onto the model where they are probably most helpful, which isn't possible with parametric splines (or at least not without deformer help etc). But may also be something to do with RM needing actual points to work with rather than a real-time mathematically generated procedural object ?
 
What are we like hey ? 2 am on Xmas day, and both of us are here ! All my lot have gone to bed, but night owls don't sleep much I guess, or at least not now ! 🙂
 
Season's best to you HP...
 
CBR

Only my guesses, but I think that could be because that feature is primarily meant to be used with spline sketch to project guide splies directly onto the model where they are probably most helpful, which isn't possible with parametric splines (or at least not without deformer help etc). But may also be something to do with RM needing actual points to work with rather than a real-time mathematically generated procedural object ?
 
What are we like hey ? 2 am on Xmas day, and both of us are here ! All my lot have gone to bed, but night owls don't sleep much I guess, or at least not now ! 🙂
 
Season's best to you HP...
 
CBR

In your version you need to be in the Sculpt layout, and then the bake function is here...
 

 
Cool model btw - sort of like a cross between a Thestral and what you might see a White Walker riding !
 
CBR
 

Welcome to the Core and Happy Christmas ! 
 
I fully sympathize - I can never fully 'get' the behaviour of those clamp constraints, and they never seem to do exactly what I want, so I am the wrong person to advise on use of those.  But I can recommend a different way, depending on what you need.
 
One very simple way to get a straight spline between 2 things that move is to position 2 'target' Nulls at the connection points of / as children of your main objects, then use the Tracer to 'connect all nodes' which will constantly draw a straight spline between them.
 
If you want to try simulation then Rope Belt is probably the way to go, but I would tend to avoid that approach, as it is quite difficult to art direct 'tension' using that and things have a tendency to be very 'floppy'.
 
CBR

I would guess you are changing it in the wrong place, and not here, which is the place you need to fix it...
 

 
...and indeed, you had that set to default of -981 cm.
 
CBR
 

The only option we have inside Extrude / caps is the Bevel Outside option but I don't think that does quite what you are looking for either. So in this case, I would say, yes; use the bevel deformer instead.
 
CBR

Righty - here's how I'd go about modelling that base...
 
We have 12 way rotational symmetry, and within that 2 way planar symmetry, meaning we only have to design topology for a nice small manageable section. And we don't need to go to the centre with that, because that is on a dual axis curve so we don't want any poles there. We'll make a patch for that later.
 
1. I started by outlining the main nubbin with as few polys as I thought I could get away with (whilst still keeping them mainly even)...
 

 
I am using HB retopo for this, but if you find yourself without that, then polygon snap will do just fine in a pinch, and you could even shrink wrap onto the CAD model to more rigidly stick to that surface as you work)...
 
I am working with symmetry here, so have only modelled the right side... you can optionally use the symmetry Hub / mode, but for technical reasons, I didn't on this occasion !
 
2. Next, let's patch that any old how, expecting to need to revise it later, and expand the upper border... mostly using poly pen here, and frequently utilising things like smooth edges and equal spacing to keep things neat...
 

 
3. We need to continue out to half way across the square block bits, so did that, trying to keep edges as even as possible.
 

 
4. But now my modelling spidey senses kick in to suggest we'll be needing some harder edges and corners on the inner edge of the square bits, and that we should continue the lower loop around the indent on, to keep its outer control loop flowing around it (rather than down towards the centre), which led to the following topology changes...
 

 
So I've run an extra loop across the square bit, and slid some edges about to get tight control loops for those corners, but, crucially, have got 4 evenly spaced edges at both inner and outer borders, which is vital for perfect SDS circularity (top) and partial sphericity (inner). I actually went on a bit beyond this to tighten those corners further before the next stage, and added some consistency as to how I did the cornering and additional loops round bevels for better base mesh definition.
 

 
5.  So, having got one segment of the 12 mostly right, we can radial clone that x 12 to get the complete outer ring for the base. That'll  need to be in a connect (weld on) to join those together. Having done that, we can make that connect editable, and count our border edges, which in my case was 48, which we can divide by 4 to conclude that we need a 12 x 12 plane for that centre section, and we will need to make that editable, Fit Circle it, relax / iron the inner points, project it to the CAD model (shrink wrap deformer) so we match the curve exactly and then CO&D that to the connect we made earlier, which should match perfectly if plans have gone well thus far...
 

 
This means we don't have any complex poles in the base on that subtle curved area at the centre, which is important, because even though the slope is quite gentle there, it curves in 2 directions at once, so triangles or pole counts more than 4 will produce SDS artefacts that will be variously noticeable and not fixed by adding more SDS levels. SDS L3 is perfectly sufficient for this unless we choose to use SDS edge weighting (not necessary here), which would necessitate an extra level of it.
 

 
...and that leaves us a very manageable 48 radial polys with which to work our way up the rest of the bottle...
We conclude that section with an Optimize, and checking it with Mesh Checker to hopefully reveal all quads and no borders, isolated points, or other errors ! 🙂
 

 
Hope that helps
 
CBR

I have never used the plugin so can't compare what we have to it, but this is the recently added Normal Editor we now have within Cinema (2024+).

 
Not sure if that can do what you need, but that's what it looks like, and is accessible from the mesh menu or via commander.
 
CBR

Ok, if you are going to move stuff then I think soft selection (a tab within PSR tools) is most useful to you, in conjunction with a few of our selection tools to make sure we are only moving certain things...
 
For example, in poly mode, you could start with U,L (loop select) to grab a loop high up on the arm, then do U,F (fill selection) to grab every poly under that to the end of the fingers in one easy click... and then you can put the modelling axis in the most helpful place for the operation at hand (axis mode or sliders under tool attributes), turn on soft selection in any component mode, set a suitable radius and start massaging things in the right direction, using perhaps the standard transform tools in conjunction with Brush / Smear tools to make things go where you want them. Here's an example of how you might do that...
 
So here I have a low poly model of a larger gentleman with his arms in wrong place. I have done the above and selected all the polys in right arm, engaged soft selection (surface mode so we don't grab his body too by mistake) and moved and rotated the axis so it lines up with his body in a way that will be most helpful to me then rotating it from that point, straighter.
 

 
So using mainly rotate and move tools I can now get his arm vaguely where I want it, like so...
 

 
and I can keep adjusting until it is mostly right, and then turn attention to the now mangled loops in the transition area.
For these we can move into Edge mode, get the Move tool, and double click to get individual rings of edges that we can then move about to even out the transition and hopefully avoid any intersection.
 
Whilst we are in the modelling tools though, a number of other things there are likely to be very helpful; Iron (applied to the polys around the transition point) and Brush (smooth / relax modes) both do superb jobs of smoothing and untangling any bunched up or intersecting polys. That way I can get his pose exactly right, more like this one...
 

 
The important thing whilst doing all this is not to actually add or delete any points / edges or polys to this mesh, which will break your UVs if you do - the mesh's point count and order must remain the same in order to preserve that, but apart from that, you can do pretty much anything you like to your base mesh before you rig it !
 
Hope that helps
 
CBR
 
 
 

That'll be a spline interpolation thing. Change Natural to Uniform and increase Number to something like...

 
You could use less subdivisions if you only had more original points in the spline, but you don't so we have to keep the number high to stop it rounding off the corner. But now everything should be going along it at a consistent rate.
 
CBR

Alas my job went on all night, so only had time for a quick preliminary look at this in which I tried the plan above, applied a single level of SD and then changed the edge flow around the mouth. Not sure it's the holotype solution here, but hopefully it's a nudge in the right direction..
 

 
I may have an improved version of that later... but actually the more pronounced corner to the mouth is more what snake mouths do than what you were aiming for.
 
But we could also try and recue what you have and get what you want, but we really do need to add that extra loop to do it (and another one through the eyes nose ideally). But that is not something to fear, and once we have spread out the ones either side it's already looking a bit more even front to back if not top to bottom... and we don't get much pinching this way...
 

 
 
CBR

There has been an issue recently with selection in orthographic viewports, but I was not aware of anything affecting Perspective view. However testing that in latest versions today I concur with you there is a problem in all viewports, which I have reported. As you note, the only workaround I can find at the moment is to shift the view and reselect, which I appreciate isn't ideal.
 
If it is helpful at all while they work on that, in the meantime I believe it all works correctly back in 2023.1.2.
 
CBR

It's not my area of specialisation, but I watch developments with interest. I think most people still consider Maya the ultimate for rigging, but I don't think Cinema is doing too badly in that department either. We recently improved quite a lot about weights and symmetry workflows, and before that Character Object and C-Motion were good leaps forward in setting up these things quite quickly without a great deal of in-depth knowledge...
 
I found Noseman's recent 4 hour rigging series on the Maxon training team's YT channel particularly helpful in understanding all the rigging basics and possibilities open to us, so maybe it would help you catch up too...
 
 
Or for even more detail, and a better focus on character rather than than machine riggings, there was this excellent (and exhaustively thorough) series that preceded it.
 
 
CBR

I think the more apposite question might be 'Why is OBJ so much more inefficient than every other format?' !!
It's true OBJ files can be huge. I don't know specifically why this is, but feel sure it must have something to do with 'legacy', given that OBJ is a very old and 'first gen' format that should have been retired a while back, but (presumably) for backwards compatibility and 'library' reasons, hasn't been.
 
CBR
 
 

If you need assistance at that level of detail you may be waiting a while I'm afraid - quite a heavy workload at the moment, and those sort of posts take hours to compose. However I have built it (to proof-of-concept level), and so can give you edited highlights now...
 
There are about 4 principal stages, thusly...
 
1. Helix spline in Extrude, but with very specific settings. In the helix the number of points is 8 x number of complete rotations. The end angle is -360 x number of rotations. Do 1 more spirals at each end than you need (I did 8 total), as you will be slicing this flat at both ends later. There should be zero spline interpolation, so that each full turn contains no more than 8 points in the resulting geometry.  The Extrude should also have no (depth) segments initially, but should be deep enough to overlap itself by about an 1/8th of the depth of each band.
 

 
2. At this point we need to take an editable polygon copy of that via CStO, so we can edit and add loops to it. We need to add loops using Loop Cut (K,L)  to both top and bottom of the spiral, so that the border edges can be scaled in on XZ to fix the overlaps and tuck the wrap under itself nicely. A further loop can be added to define the narrow darker strip at the bottom of each wrap at this point.
 
3. In the next group of steps we need to re-orient the model (but not its axis) by 22.5 degrees on H, top and tail it to flat, non-spiral borders at both ends using Plane Cut (K,J), solve the ends to quads and scale groups of edges apart to better match the elongated shape, before selecting the edges and bevelling them to gain additional support loops there, and harder creases on the corners.
 
4. Last stage is FFDing that with a great many Y segments so you can match XZ curvature around the handle from top to bottom of it...
 
I will pop back to add further detail as time permits this week...
 
CBR

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

You may be forgetting that with Loft objects the resolution is not derived from source splines but from the object itself.
Massively increase U segments in Loft Object...
 

 
I don't like this method for doing this sort of thing because it is quite difficult to get (and verify) identical segmentation on each side unless you symmetrize later. Also note distribution of edges, which is kinda arbitrary and not that great if we're honest.
 
By the time you have sorted that out for regular spacing and whatnot, you may as well have modelled it from polygons with symmetry and got a more usable base going forward ! If we definitely want to use splines, then Extrude is the better generator because that does take its interpolation and point counts from the spline, and it is trivially easy to add the little ridge bit on one end later...
 

 
Of course if you need splines for further modelling tasks you can still use the ones you have, or generate them anew from your evenly divided model using Edge to Spline...
 
CBR
 
 

STEP import improves with every recent release - it is already leagues better than it used to be, and will continue to improve further as time goes on, but for now it is not perfect. Geo tends to come in just fine and fully controllably via the import controls (max edge length / angle etc) but materials are less robust currently - at the moment we are lucky to get material tags / selections assigned different colours, and that is about the best we can hope for IME. Generally, you need to redo the textures in Cinema / PS etc...
 
CBR
 
 

I can sort of understand why that might happen, but it's not helpful behaviour; if the segments are the same in both cylinders they should align regardless of  segmentation being even or not. That's what everyone'll expect to happen.
 
Also a regression, as this doesn't happen in 2023.x.x.. anyway - I reported it, and thanks for sharing.
 
CBR

Still there, albeit renamed and in slightly different place...
 

 
CBR

Generated polys, as opposed to physical ones, such as the ones added by for example SDS, or sweeps / lathes / extrudes etc etc...
 
CBR

Nope. But there is VAMP which can be used to transfer UVs between meshes of radically different points counts and orders.
 

 
2024.x.x includes a new evaluation method, Nearest Polygon, which is pretty effective.
 
 
CBR

Correct. I presume that's why we have spline chamfer as well, but that is a node rather than a node operator, so don't think it can be dragged into OM like (geo) Chamfer can.
 
CBR

If you use a simulation scene object rather than the default back-end one, then that, (together with all the forces and sim tags it contains) can be disabled globally using its green tick and keyframed via the enabled checkbox button under Basic...
 
CBR

You should still have the various options, Tiny-Huge, but they are under Scene (previously called Project) Settings, under Display section. Or you can set it to custom to set both limits.
 

 
CBR