Manual Reference Material Manager Shaders Channel Shaders
Bitmap Shader
Bitmap Shader
To load a bitmap into the material channel, click the Texture box or three dots button and use the file selection dialog that opens to load the bitmap.
In general, the bitmap should be located in either your scene’s folder, your scene’s ‘Tex’ sub-folder or a texture path that you have specified in the preferences. A dialog will warn if the image file is not in a search path and will ask if you want to copy the image to the document’s folder or, if your scene doesn’t have its own folder yet, to the CINEMA 4D root folder.
If you click ‘No’, CINEMA 4D will save an absolute path to the image and you’ll see the path appear in the input box. When copying the CINEMA 4D scene to a different computer, be sure to copy over these textures as well — a useful command here Save Project from the main File menu (look up ‘Save Project command’ for more details on this command, which equates to the ‘Collect For Output’ command you may be familiar with from working with other software tools).
Once you have loaded a texture, its path name will appear in the Texture box and a preview of the texture will appear below the box.
- the CINEMA 4D/Tex folder
- the scene’s folder
- the scene’s Tex sub-folder
- the texture paths specified in the preferences (including sub-folders).
- CINEMA 4D also checks any absolute paths that were used when the textures were originally loaded
If CINEMA 4D cannot find a texture when rendering, a message will appear to tell you which textures are missing and which materials use these textures. You can still render the scene without the missing textures by clicking OK.
You can access further settings for the texture by clicking the texture preview or Texture box.
If you edit an image using an external application, it can be updated in CINEMA 4D by clicking on the Reload Image button. Clicking on Edit Image will open the image in an external image editing application, as defined by your operating system.