Cinema Material Editor
- jeremy (Unlicensed)
To open the plugin's integrated Maxwell Material Editor, either click the 'Material Editor' button in the Material's Attribute Manager interface, or click the 'Material Editor' item in the plugin's main menu. This will bring up the plugin's integrated Material Editor, which is very similar to Maxwell MXED (as noted in the MXM Linking section, a linked material does not show this interface; it shows the same interface as the Attribute Manager):
Create Menu
Use this menu to create various types of materials:
| Item | Function |
|---|---|
| New Material | Creates a new basic lambertian Material with Reflectance 0 of 153, 153, 153. |
| From MXM | Prompts for the path to an MXM file, which it then uses to create a new Material. |
| Creates a new material that uses the Maxwell Render Material Assistants feature. |
| Diffuse | Creates a simple diffuse Material. |
| Emitter | Creates an Emitter Material, using either RGB and power values, or an MXI/HDR texture, if one is specified. |
| Dielectric | Creates a simple dielectric (transparent) Material. The Color value will be used as the Material's Transmittance color, as will the color map, if one is specified. Specifying an Abbe value other than 160.0 will activate Dispersion in the new Material. |
| Metal | Creates a simple metallic Material using one of six pre-defined metals; aluminum, cobalt, copper, gold, nickel, and silver. |
| Plastic | Creates a two-BSDF (Color Base & Gloss) plastic Material. The basic color of the Material is specified using the Diffuse Color value, or the Color texture. The Specular Color value is used in the Gloss layer's Reflectance 90 color channel. |
MXM Options Menu
Use this menu to perform various operations relating to Maxwell MXM files.
| Item | Function |
|---|---|
| Import MXM Data | As implied by the name, this imports MXM data into an existing Material, replacing its current state entirely. |
| Export as MXM | This item exports the current state of this Material to an MXM file. When this is done, the option is given to link the Material being exported to the target MXM. |
| Edit with MXED | The main purpose of this item is to give access to any advanced capabilities of MXED, which may not be available in the plugin's own Material Editor. |
| Open MXED Browser | This is just a shortcut to opening the MXED MXM browser. Due to the technical details of how C4D works, drag-drop from the browser behaves differently depending on where MXMs are dropped. When dropped over the Material Editor's preview image, the MXM will be imported into the scene. If an entire folder is dropped, the MXMs inside will be imported to the scene. It also works in a similar way when MXM files are drag/dropped from Explorer or Finder. Unfortunately though, when MXM files are dropped from Explorer or Finder into the C4D Material Manager, C4D interprets this as a File > Open operation, and creates a new C4D file rather than allowing the plugin to import them, so it is not recommended to drag-drop from Explorer/Finder into the C4D Material Manager window – drop them onto the Material Editor's preview image instead. |
| Browse MXM Gallery | This command opens Maxwell MXED's MXM Gallery Browser, which allows you to search the online database of MXM materials:
During this process, all files referenced by the newly-downloaded MXM will be placed in a textures folder under the mxmgallery folder. The paths inside of the MXM file will be altered to point to the new location, since many MXMs from the MXM Gallery contain paths which will not exist on your machine. |
Material Overview Pane
This portion of the Material Editor window is used to control the global state of the Material.
| Item | Description |
|---|---|
| Material Preview | Double-clicking the preview will start a preview-refresh (as with MXED). Dragging an MXM file from the Cinema Content Browser, MXED MXM Browser, or Explorer/Finder and dropping it here will cause it to be imported into the scene. |
| Active Texture | Sets which one of this Material's textures will be shown in the viewport (if it has any textures) using a drop-down menu. To show the basic color of the Material again, select (none) from the menu. |
| Real-time Preview | This sets whether the material editor will refresh the preview automatically whenever a material parameter is changed. It may be useful to disable it when rendering in Fire, to allow your CPU to work on the Fire image without getting slowed down by attempting to keep material previews updated in real time.Note that for technical reasons, in C4D versions prior to R12, this option is contained in the plugin's Preferences panel (page 51), rather than here as a button in the material editor. |
| Refresh Preview | This button simply requests that a new material preview be rendered. |
Material Layers Tree
Similar to the tree found in MXED, this control allows you to define the structure of the material. New components are added by right-clicking the desired parent component and choosing what to add (i.e. right-click a Layer to add a BSDF). Child components may be re-ordered under their parent by dragging them from their current position and dropping them on their parent node; this will put them at the top of the list.
Components may be copied by holding down CTRL while executing a drag-drop action; rather than moving the dragged component, a copy of it will be added to the target node.
Additionally, individual components may be dragged back and forth between the Layers tree and the various pages in the Database Manager; this makes it easy to build new materials from pre-defined components.
Material Page
The parameters in this page apply to the Material as a whole. Each Material saves its own Preview Options, so that different MXS preview scenes may be used for different types of Materials. The MXS preview scenes listed in the Scene drop-down are those found in the Maxwell/preview directory. In addition to specifying individual bump maps in each BSDF layer, it is also possible to supply a bump (or normal) map here which will be used to affect the material as a whole.
BSDF Page
The operation of this page is similar to that of the BSDF page in MXED. When certain parameters in the page are grayed-out, it means that they would have no effect; they will become enabled when other parameters have been changed in such a way as to make them effective.
When Reflectance > IOR is set to 'Measured Data', all of the parameters in the Reflectance group will be grayed out, since they have no effect in this case. Similarly, the min/max Thickness controls in the SubSurface group are only enabled when (a) Single Side SSS is enabled, and (b) an SSS Thickness map is assigned and enabled.
Layer Page
The operation of this page is similar to that of the Layer page in MXED.
Coating Page
The operation of this page is similar to that of the Coating page in MXED. Similar to the BSDF page, the parameters in the Reflectance group will be hidden when Reflectance > IOR is set to 'Measured Data', since they have no effect in this case.
Displacement Page
The operation of this page is similar to that of the Displacement page in MXED. Note that while MXED allows a separate Displacement layer to be added to each Layer, the plugin does not, instead placing Displacement at the Material-level. Functionality is similar, because in MXED, one of the several possible Displacement layers must be chosen – in other words, only one Displacement may be specified for the material. The plugin therefore chooses to display this relationship as it is in the layers tree.
Emitter Page
The operation of this page is similar to that of the Emitter page in MXED. The contents of the page change based on which Input type is currently selected.
Texture Editor
The operation of this window is similar to that of the Texture Editor window in MXED. Changes made to all parameters except for 'Real Scale (m)' and 'Filtering' will be shown both here in the Texture Editor's preview window, and also in the viewport, when this texture has been chosen as its parent material's viewport texture. The 'Preview size' parameter determines how detailed of a texture should be generated for use in the C4D viewport – larger sizes will require more processor time. Each parameter also has a 'reset' button to make it more convenient to return to the default value.
For convenience, the following key-modifiers are taken into account when adjusting texture parameters:
- CTRL: apply change to all textures in this texture's parent component (BSDF, Coating, etc.)
- SHIFT: apply change to all textures in this texture's parent Layer
- ALT: apply change to all textures in this texture's parent material
The browse button acts as a toggle; that is, if there is no path set, it prompts for you to select the path to an image, otherwise it clears the currently-set path.
Notes on the use of the Texture Channel Parameter
Maxwell Render supports multiple sets of UV coordinates on each mesh. These UV sets are referenced in the material using the Channel parameter; so, if an object has two sets of UVs, the decision of which to use for any given texture is determined using the Channel parameter: those which use Channel 0 will use the first set, while those which use Channel 1 will use the second.
In the Cinema texturing system, however, there exists no explicit way of associating a single material (that is, a single Texture Tag) with multiple sets of UVs. The plugin introduces a method for working around this, which consists of placing on the object multiple Texture Tags which reference the same Maxwell material:
In this case, the plugin will write multiple sets of UVs for the object. The UVs for the first Texture Tag will be written to Channel 0, those of the second will be written to Channel 1, and so on. In this way, it is possible to export different sets of custom UVs for use with the various textures contained in the Maxwell material.