MJV

This cannot be done with just any image. It only works using greyscale heightmaps such as these: https://www.pinterest.com/greglkunz/gray-height-maps/
 

Xpresso is hands down the single most important tool in all of Cinema 4D. Take it away and Cinema is nothing. There was talk of the new nodes eventually replacing it and Maxon considering Xpresso to be archaic and unworthy of further development efforts beyond basic maintenance, but that has since proved to be fantasy. Nodes are languishing and stuck in a perpetual technology preview stage with barely anyone enthralled by or enthusiastic about their future. That leaves Xpresso as the still undisputed king of Cinema, but since it isn't being actively developed there isn't much incentive for people to write about or promote it beyond the substantial and already available content on YouTube and elsewhere.

No.

See the triangle to the left of the word Format in last screen shot and toggle it.

I don't have an Apple computer to test myself but I just read an article that said QT Player cannot export MP4. Maybe it works to export 264 to movie and then change the suffice to MP4?

Many of the previously missing icons are now present, but some are still missing. In my layout, the following are missing:
 
Wireframe, Isoparms, (those two bother me the most) Skeleton, Display Filter, Save as Startup Layout, Close Project, Close all Projects,  Go to First Marker, Go to Previous Marker, Go to Next Marker, Go to Last Marker (To be fair I never use those marker buttons anyway and should remove them from my layout) Use as Render View, Go to First Key, Go to Last Key, Lock Camera Pivot, Calculate FPS, Frame Project Settings, Frame Preview Range, Go to Start, Got to End, Frame Range, 50%, 200%, Show Text, Show Line, Pixel Aspect, Vertical Tags, Object Information, Convert Object Selection to XRefs, Unfold Selection, Fold Selection.
 
Wow I wasn't expecting this list to be so long, but to be fair again many of those last ones I listed I use text menus only and I just turned on the icons to see if they were there or not. 

For the last bit try enter model mode, select all objects, enable axis tool and then zero the rotations in the coordinates manager. Thereafter all the objects should have the same rotation provided they aren't children of different objects.

Maybe you can do something like this.  
 

ShockwaveDeformationMV6a.mp4    
ShockwaveDeformationMV6.c4d

So an update. Houdini support kindly informed me that I should be inside a geometry node first, and what do you know that fixed it. 🍳🥴  (I knew the Tab menu was contextual to different directories, but not that it was object and node contextual.)  Everything is right again in my Houdini world. Thanks everyone for helping me.

As predicted: 
 

Hi Igor. I finally got it. First I was looking in the wrong directory (for some reason the houdini directory with the "houdini.env" was in the One Drive Documents file which I try to never use instead of the user Documents file) , then I had typed slightly the wrong syntax. Man that was a massive headache. Well I've leave this here for now. Maybe others will have the same problem. 

The clamps didn't work because the input lower value was higher than the input higher value. I think this file is closer to what you were looking to do. 
699619742_C4DQUESTIONMOVEOBJECTWITHINRANGEMAPBOUNDARYV1MV1.c4d