How to Use Material Override to Add Reflectance on Multiple Materials

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Instructor Rick Barrett

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  • Duration: 03:34
  • Views: 5934
  • Made with Release: 17
  • Works with Release: 17 and greater

Use Material Override in C4DR17 to add Reflectance on Multiple Materials

In this tutorial, you'll learn how the Material Override option in Cinema 4D Release 17 can be used to easily apply the same reflectance settings to all materials in your scene. Simply create a material that defines the Reflectance parameters, and override all existing materials, preserving every channel EXCEPT Reflectance. Exclude Materials from the Override that should be matte or for which you'd like to manage the Reflectance individually. Now you can tweak a single material to manage the Reflectance of the entire scene.

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Transcript

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