Cinema - Convert Materials

This command is provided for the purpose of translating native C4D materials into Maxwell Materials. Several options for controlling exactly how this is done are provided.

How should the conversion be performed?

Firstly, there are three mutually-exclusive options; all will create new Maxwell Materials and add them to the C4D Material Manager. Optionally, the choice may be made to also create duplicates of existing Texture tags with the newly-created Maxwell Materials assigned to them. Alternatively, instead of duplicating existing Texture tags, the plugin can also directly replace the material assignments of the existing tags with the newly-created Maxwell Materials.

The choice is also given whether the plugin ought to perform conversion of all existing C4D materials, or just the ones which are currently-selected in the C4D Material Manager. Optionally, the plugin will render previews for all converted materials automatically, on a background thread.

Render Cinema procedural textures to disk?

This section works in a way identical to that of the corresponding section of the Scene object.

Notes on automatic C4D material conversion

It is not possible to make a direct mapping between how C4D and Maxwell materials work; the models used are just completely different. That said the plugin does go to a fairly great length in its attempt to translate native C4D materials into useful Maxwell representations. Here is how the C4D channels and parameters are translated:

Channel	Description
Color	Color and Brightness will be used to determine the resulting Maxwell material's basic color, which is controlled using the Reflectance 0 color of its base BSDF. If a texture is specified in the C4D material, it will be placed in the base BSDF's Reflectance 0 map channel. If the texture is procedural then it will be mixed with the C4D material's Color and Brightness parameters using the specified Mix Mode and Mix Strength.
Diffusion	Brightness will be used to influence the basic color of the generated Maxwell material. If a texture is specified, it will be used in the most reflective layer of the generated Maxwell material. If the texture is procedural, it will also be used to generate a new map for the base BSDF's Reflectance 0 channel; basically, this could be though of as a dynamically-generated 'dirt' map which combines the basic Reflectance 0 color of the BSDF with the procedural diffusion map. As with a procedural Color map, the appearance of this map will be influenced by the Mix Mode and Mix Strength parameters.
Luminance	When activated, the plugin will create a Maxwell Emitter material. In this case, any other C4D channels will be ignored. If an HDR (i.e. mxi, hdr, exr) texture is specified, then this will be used to create the Maxwell material as an image-based emitter; otherwise, the output color will be determined using the C4D Color parameter, while the output power will be determined using the C4D Brightness parameter. Output power for auto-generated emitters is always specified in lux (lumens per m²) to ensure that output power scales reasonably with different scene sizes. Note: if the luminance color is effectively pure black, and there is also no file-based or procedural texture in the channel, this channel will be treated as if it were disabled.
Specular	The plugin will create a plasticine or metallic Material, depending on the Mode parameter. When set to metallic, a single BSDF will be created and its Reflectance 90 channel will be set to a weaker version of the C4D material's basic color. Otherwise, a 2-layer plasticine material will be created. In either case, the C4D Width parameter will be used to control the material's roughness, in order to give a reflective response similar to that of the C4D material.
Transparency	When activated, the plugin will create a dielectric Maxwell material. In this case, the Color and Specular channels in the C4D material will be ignored, if they are activated, and instead the Color and Brightness parameters in the Transparency channel will be used to determine the base BSDF's Transmittance color. If a texture is specified, then it will be placed in the BSDF's Transmittance map. It is important to use a realistic Refraction value, as this will be directly translated by the plugin, and will be placed in the BSDF's Nd field. The attenuation of the BSDF will be set using the Cinema Absorption distance, factoring for the current scene scale. The Blurriness parameter will be used to increase the material's attenuation, and also to add some roughness, again in an attempt to approximate what would be seen in the C4D material being converted. Note: if the transparency color is effectively pure black, and there is also no file-based or procedural texture in the channel, this channel will be treated as if it were disabled. Also, if there a map is specified, and that map contains only greyscale values, the Transparency channel will be used as an alpha channel instead.
Bump	The texture specified here will be placed in the Maxwell Material's Global Bump channel, with the Strength parameter being translated into the Global Bump value
Normal	This works similarly to the Bump channel, except that the map will have normal mapping enabled, and the values specified for Flip X and Flip Y will be transferred into their corresponding places in the Maxwell bump channel.
Alpha	A texture found here will be placed in the Mask map of each layer in the material, producing a clip-mapped Maxwell Material. If the texture specified resides in a C4D library, and uses alpha-channel to accomplish clipping, then this map will be translated by the plugin and saved to disk as a black-and-white Maxwell-style clip map.
Displacement	The texture specified here will be placed in the Maxwell Material's Displacement layer, with the Strength and Height parameters being used to set the Maxwell displacement Height.