HappyPolygon

First you need to model in classic and low-res before sending it to sculpt mode. It's not that hard to make the follicle as it requires simple extrusions. Although @Cerbera is our modelling guru, I think the following steps are acceptable: First delete some polygons in order to see the negative extrusion. Then select a polygon where the well will start to form from and begin making multiple extrusions. In each step scale and move the base polygon to be on the same level as the front face of the cube, also delete the new polygon that obscures the visibility. Next using Weld and Bridge make adjustments to make a nice topology I used the Remesh to increase the number of polygons a bit. Then I made some sculpting subdivisions For more pronounced edges I used the Flatten sculpting tool with the following settings and used the Front viewport for constant level. Then you model your hair any way you like as a separate object. WARNING If you plan to animate the follicle (for example make it disappear after the hair is removed) then I don't think sculpting it is a good idea. If you want to animate the structure/volume of this cross-section then I think the Volume Builder is a nice solution. Unfortunately you won't be able to paint on the volume builder but there are techniques in R2023 (I don't use R2023 currently) that enable Fields to colorize your mesh and with the proper use of vertex map tags and vertex map shaders you can blend complex materials on the parametric Volume Mesher through fields.

At the top of your profile page, where the banner image is there are 3 options. The middle one is where you can fill various info

I think the movie shot is CG and the trailer one practical.

Discord will never replace forums. Discord at best can be compared to a FB group discussion page. The only difference is that there are multiple discussion sub-threads under the same group. There is constant news feed in each thread. This is the nature of discussions there that there's really not need for searching far back in the dialogue to find something specific. It's like having Core4D's Sub-Forums like Cinema4D/Houdini/Blender act like single threads, if more than one people asked something our dialogues would be tangled and hard to keep track. Forums like Core4D and StackExchange that work in a Question-Answer model cannot be supported by Discord. Discord is an unconstructed Forum. It's basically chat rooms.

Noseman's approach resembles a planar ray collision like as in area light ray-casting. I though you needed something more narrow like a laser-stripe. My suggestion to Maxon involved something like this: There's a Ray Collision node (both in XPresso and Scene Nodes) that might help you. But I'm not sure about the discreet nature of it (voxel like distribution of clones) and discreetness in space (original surface polygon space). I'm very eager to see how Noseman tackled this.

@DefJeff Very nice scene. I see the amount of complexity. I've noticed you use Global Illumination from some colored shadows near the stairs. I also noticed how well-lit your scene is by the absence of shadows all over the place. This could indicate that you either use a lot of light sources or have disabled shadows. Try not using the light objects in places were the "real" scene lights are (light bulbs). The more light sources you use the slower the render (especially with GI). Use the Luminance channel on those objects (portal, screens, light bulbs). Notice that a Luminance of 100% will just make the object bright enough to eliminate casting shadows on it from other objects. In order to make them cast light on near-by surfaces you need to exceed 100%. The exact value depends on the scale of your models. As for the metal materials, I don't see any real reflections from the surrounding environment. This means you could just fake the "metallic" surface by enabling only the Specular Strength and not having to worry about the Reflectance Strength. Legacy material models have much faster rendering times. Do you use Anisotropy for the "waves/scratches" or a texture ? Since this is an interior image you should consider disabling any Sky/Background illumination. Personally I would be astonished by the result of having only the portal illuminating the room. The light (luminance channel) from that thing alone would make a dramatic scene ! (also since it will be the only light source the render time will also dramatically shrink).

Please fill your profile with the appropriate info (version of C4D) so we can provide a solution better suited for you.

What do you mean ? What's "out there" that is better than Forums ?

Having a hoppy as an adult is expensive. I have a friends that have taken 3D Printing and Drone photography. They started low now they own 4-5 of these machines each better than the other and in the end use only the latest with the others just occupying space. I, myself, am a hobbyist and I'm perfectly fine with my Legion 5 Lenovo 17" laptop with NVidia 3050. But I almost never make videos, only stills. For animations I would consider a render farm.

Use some AdBlock add-ons. the more I stay on the site the number goes up.

most of the part yes, BUT... Render times do not rely only on materials. Most of the time it's the lighting model itself (Area lights, Global Illumination, Ambient Occlusion, photon samples etc) and effects (Motion Blur, Depth of Field etc). Usually what makes a render slow in Materials is the SubSurface Scattering and high levels of SubPolygon Displacement. And talking about SubPolygon Displacement leads to the geometry itself. High number of polygons can also increase the amount of render times dramatically when combined with the above mentioned options both material-wise and lighting model. Your materials don't have SSS or SPD but they have reflections. This can really slow down rendering when a lot of polygons are to be reflected again and again. So for starters try to drop the reflection depth to 3 and see how much that reduces time. Usually Blur in reflective and transparent materials also increase time a lot. Instead of baking the reflections which leads to a static textured material completely devoid from realistic reflection interactions with the environment and of course camera angle you can try to use an HDRI as a reflection. This way the material will no longer reflect the environment but only the image. Since you send your render to a Render Farm you shouldn't be worried about render times. How long does it take for you to render one single frame in your computer and how long does it take to render the same frame at the render farm ? I understand that render farms can be expensive sometimes but given the amount of power they have I really doubt from what your screenshot shows that it would take more than an hour to render a 300 frame video at 2K. Also your profile does not mention what version of C4D you use. I could add more details but I choose not to because it gets trivial. Better provide screenshots from your render settings from the Physical tab (if you are using the Physical Renderer)

Have you tried to drag and drop objects from the OM to the Node graph ? it auto-converts them into nodes (R25).

Also the other two tags, Options and Details. I wanted to check if you included all the materials in the Details list. Are you trying to export the object to a game machine ? What is the reason for baking it ? Maybe if we know the purpose we can give better advice.

I've never seen this. How long has it been ?

Can you take some screenshots of the Bake Material tag's tabs for us ?

I had a second look at your graphs and it seems that it involves a lot of raw math. Doing math with nodes demands a new node for each operator. I'm watching it and I wonder "why doesn't he just use a Python node to write a single line of ((x1*y2-y1*x2)*(x3-x4)-(x1-x2)*(x3*y4-y3*x4))/((x1-x2)*(y3-y4)-(y1-y2)*(x3-x4)) ?" And then it hit me... the Python Node is available only in XPresso .... Oh God... well, here's a new node suggestion 😆 it can reduce your graph by 38 nodes ! I'm thinking of suggesting a C-like Node. It will understand only strings involving math operations between variables and numbers. I think it would be faster than a Python Node... Hmmm... I assumed they used hard-coded high-level nodes. Like having the Voronoi Fracture but instead of having it manifest in the Onject Manager it appears in SceneNodes dressed as a Node...

I think the best modeling option is to sculpt your cubic cross-section and 3D paint it. Anything involving booleans can backfire when more than two objects are involved, resulting in flickering (and slow to animate) geometry or/and flickering of materials if the objects intersect.

The amount of complexity for such basic (useful) geometric computation amazes me (dissapoints). I have made several suggestions to MAXON about similar nodes. I think the number of geometry problem solving nodes has to increase dramatically to make scene nodes a breeze to work for artistic purposes.

https://www.deepl.com/translator Is much better than Google's

I really like this post but it's not a python related question/issue and i'm afraid we are going to loose it a week after you finalize it as it will be buried under new posts. Is there a "personal blog" type of thing where you can put this ?

Change the Random Mode to Noise and set a big value to Scale and/or a small value to Animation Speed.

A trial will answer that https://info.e-onsoftware.com/try?hsCtaTracking=43dc16ed-a7bf-4183-a91a-db3c0c65b2aa|97966e93-f19b-4575-9dad-d79bbc6b0642

These must be RS renders and I have no idea how close the parameters are to the native material editor but I'll ask anyway. What penetration ray depth do you define to the SSS ?

Alternative apps don't just compete with AfterEffects but also with it's ecosystem of uncountable plugins, templates, effects, and other kind of add-ons. I thought 2nd in rank alternative was Nuke, 3rd DaVinci Resolve, 4th HitFilm and last Natron. Do we really need one more option ? I'd like to hear some opinions about the alternatives I've mentioned.

First of all welcome. Second, topics about C4D belong to the C4D topic not Discussions. Third complete your profile with the C4D version you own. As for your question. It's either dynamics or Effector-driven animation. These two are contradictory so when C4D faces both it just gives priority to dynamics. Same for the Constraint tag and dynamics. The constraint tag might be set to make the object stationary but the dynamics tag's nature is to make it move. I have made a suggestion for a middle-ground solution to this but it's still early. Here are some workarounds: While the Target Effector does not work with dynamics in Target object mode it does in Field Direction mode. Just create a Linear Field in the Falloff tab. The Target tag does work with dynamics only on individual objects.