Yes, I agree with you both. Sadly this material was a pack that said it was for octane so I'm a bit perplexed.    Rick

re priority - make sure there is an actual priority problem before you start fixing it. Things that appear to lag are often OK when rendered (or baked). I usually adjust priority by moving stuff around in the OM (top down order), or priority values lowest = 1st. There's also a shift priority tag. I'm sure you know all this.   I haven't seen much info on baking. For purely dynamic stuff I use doc settings, dynamics, cache, bake. For my more complex scenes (eg using randomness), I drag everything into the dope sheet and go functions, bake objects. Then I disable dynamics, xpresso, python, and anything that moves things. I use this method for team render, so all the nodes have identical data.

The problem I see with using the polygon reduction strength to be based upon how far away the Null is from the Polygon Reduction Generator is that can be an intense calculation that goes on there.  I think what is intended is to use the poly reduction with the LOD object to have it switch between models at the right time.  A much less intense calculation.  Even with that it's best to turn the different reduction levels into actual geometry so it can be the fastest.  In the example attached if you turn on and off Cloner.1 then on and off Cloner.2 it should be easy to see what I'm talking about.  With both you will see how the LODs are set so they switch at about the right time to give the correct illusion as the sphere get further away.  That is to say if you switch the viewport to Gouraud shading there will be no noticable change in the sphere as you zoom in and out. lod example.zip

Doesn't the FFD 'Fit To Parent' take it's orientation from the object axis, not the bounding box? The boot appears to be aligned to the world axis, so connecting it to a new object would work to reset the axis. Otherwise, he could probably just have used axis mode to zero out the HPB.

I have not tried MOP's yet I've been working on a C4D model. Have you? Glenn Frey played for a group called the Eagles from early 70's to 1980, then reformed in mid 1990's

Hello, isn't this what you are looking for?   https://greyscalegorilla.com/tutorials/how-to-make-a-hydraulic-arm-in-cinema-4d-part-revisited/

As we tried before, retarget tag doesn't work really well with imported fbx and c4d character object. Here is an old post that we has about the retarget workflow