But if you just need to quickly add reflections on all of your materials or most of your materials, this is a handy new option with the material override in Cinema 4D Release 17. Now, of course, if you want to get in and tweak individually, this option doesn't work. And now you'll see that as easy is that, we created nice reflections on all of our materials in the scene. And we can go ahead and hit the render button. And let's go ahead and make this a progressive render. Now I just want to go ahead and switch into physical render. Now, we'll just go ahead and create a sky object and apply the HDR image to the sky. And we'll drag that HDR right over the texture slot. So we'll go ahead and open this new material we created and enable just the luminance channel. Let's just find something that looks kind of car environment-like. So I'm just going to search "HDR." And here we have a number of HDR maps that come in the preset library. We'll jump into the content browser, and I'm going to search in the presets for HDRIs. So I'm going to create another new material just by double-clicking in the material editor. But of course, I need a little bit more in the scene to reflect. In this case, I just want to make everything reflective to start out. Now, if there are specific materials that I don't want to be reflective, I can just leave this mode on, exclude, and drag those into this materials list here. I'm going to leave reflectance unchecked so that it is overridden by my new material that I created. So I'm going to check all of the options here other than reflectance. Now, what I need to do is preserve all of the material options here except reflectance. And in fact, let's rename this "reflectance, " or just our "refl." And I'm going to drag it onto the custom material slot. And I'll just drag this new reflectance material. Now, to apply this reflection over all of my materials, what I can do is go into the render settings and enable the new material override option. And I'm going to go ahead and the drop the layer mask amount to maybe 75%. We gain access to the reflectance channel through the material data. And 1.35, we'll just stick with that for now. For this, you will need to get your hands dirty and create a reflectance channel using the new API. And we'll go down here to the fresnel and add a dielectric fresnel. I'm going to remove all the specular strength, add just a little bit of roughness. So we'll delete the specular, and I'm going to add a new GGX. And I'm just going to add my reflectance settings in this material. So for this, what we'll go ahead and do is create a new material. But what I can do is use the new material override option. So if I just select a bunch of materials and add reflectance, I can't easily add them to all the materials. Well, Cinema 4D does have this issue where you can't multi-edit reflections. But all of the materials come in flat, and of course, I need to add some reflection on this car. Here I have a car model that I imported using Cinema 4D Release 17's new OBJ import, which has lots more options than previously, including the option to bring in all the materials.
How to make reflectance material cinema 4d how to#
In this tutorial, we're going to look at how to use Global Material Override to quickly add reflections into your scene.