Manual Reference Material Manager
File Menu
This command (or a double-click on an empty area of the Material Manager) creates a new material with default values (white with specularity). The new material is placed at the start of the material list.
To define a specific material to be the default material each time a new material is activated simply select the given material and subsequently the Edit > Set as Default in the Attributes Manager.
Shader
This menu lists CINEMA 4D’s volume shaders, including the volume shaders formerly known as SLA (such as Cheen and Banji). These shaders are described here.
This command loads materials, adding them to any materials already in the scene. You can also import materials from another scene by loading the scene file.
A word of caution regarding textures:
By default, CINEMA 4D will search for all textures here:
In the same folder as the scene
In the Tex folder within the scene’s folder
In the Tex folder within the CINEMA 4D folder
If a given bitmap was saved to an absolute path, CINEMA 4D will, in this case, only search within this path, and will ignore all other defined search paths.
When CINEMA 4D renders the scene, it must locate all the textures. When the scene is to be used on another computer (perhaps by a colleague) we recommend that you save the scene using the Save Project command. This will save all of the textures used by the scene in a ‘Tex’ sub-folder. Save Project is comparable to the ‘Collect For Output’ command that you may be familiar with from using other software tools.
Saves the selected materials. The standard system dialog for saving files will open. Once you have saved the materials, you can reload them at any time using the Load Materials command.
Saves all the materials in the active scene. Use the Load Materials command when you want to load the materials.
These options let you load material presets from a list of presets or save material presets (they will be saved to the Content Browser’s Presets/User directory).
Materials can be placed into the Presets/User directory per drag & drop. Inversely, materials can be dragged from this directory into the Material Manager.
Closes a manager.