feuer feuer

I've been considering adding Cinema 4D to my inventory since I find I spend most of my time anyway working on renderings in Vectorworks and I'm trying to see what else is out there. Does anyone actively use Cinema 4D and Vectorworks Architect/Spotlight? and if so do you find them to be a good combination, i.e. do they play nice? I've been messing around with the free C4D demo for awhile and see that it does seems intuitive, there is a pretty sizable learning curve for someone who's never used a strictly 3D rendering program and I'm trying to judge whether or not it's worth learning. To start off, the first thing I noticed about exporting from VW to C4D is that my textures are all gone that were originally in my VW file. This already seems like a major downside, and when reimporting the textures(I guess materials in C4D lingo) the scale doesn't seem to be that easy to adjust. Any thoughts? What are some other experiences of people who've tried it and either didn't like it or did?

Does anyone already have anything like a translucent paper texture that they've made? I'm trying to make a typical kind of Chinese lantern with an emitter inside but whatever texture I give to the sphere shape around the light I can't seem to get the light to shine through it. Has anyone done this before or know if it's possible to make an object like this?

Indeed I have Unified View selected and layers aligned just in case but I don't think that makes much difference in the camera view. The only thing I have checked in the Unified View Options is Ignore Layers with Different Scale. I have Show Others selected and all the layers are set to visible. This is where I got really stumped and started thinking it was something wrong with the install but then it opened the 2009 file just fine.

Recently I've upgraded to Vectorworks 2010 from 2009. Since then I can't seem to get more than one layer to render with their textures. All I get are gray textures. I tried most recently using a camera and I get a wireframe rendering of all the layers together to problem, but when I try and do something like Renderworks with shadows I get the grays as always. That is unless I make one of the other layers active, then I can see that layer properly rendered with the correct textures, but only that layer. Everything else just stays gray. In 2009 I never had this problem, and just to make things more interesting when I open a Vectorworks 2009 file it works the way it used to with all layers rendering the same way. I'm really clueless as to what the problem can be and I'm running out of hairs to pull out. Anybody have any idea of what I'm doing wrong? Thanks.