Material Layers
It is important to understand the concept of the VRAYforC4D material to understand its power and possibilities.
A few important points:
- The VRAY material consists of 14 material layers, Layers are stacked one above the others. Maybe the easiest thing is to imagine them as a photoshop file with 14 layers.
- Most of this layers can have its own mask or transparency.
- If parts of one layer are transparent the layer below shows through.
- The whole material can be masked, blended or stacked with other vray materials through the “material weight” parameter (similar to c4d alpha).
Material Layers Schema
Layers (Channels)
The VRAY material can be edited through the Attribute Manager (AM) or through the Cinema Material Editor. I personally recommend using the Material editor or an extra AM as it has normally more space to see all settings in the Vray Material.
Here is a screenshot of the Material Editor:
One the left there are the material “layers” or channels, within the channels You can load textures or Cinema 4d shaders just as you probably are already used to it from Cinema 4D. one the right side you have the vray specific settings. almost all aspects can be controlled via shaders and textures.
The Material preview is done in real time, you can use all preview types like in normal cinema 4d (sphere, cube, rounded cube, cylinder, double knot etc...)
The double knot p.e. is very good for previewing reflective materials like metals.
Right click on the preview to choose the size of it (here i used “huge”), there is also a drop down menu to select the preview quality to adjust it to your needs. the preview is done by the native vray engine and uses all cpu in your system it is fully multithreaded.
To render in Vray one must use the VRAY Material, there is a one button translator in the plugins menu to convert c4d materials to vray materials to start rendering in vray, know you can render with native c4d material, but VRAY Materials have more options.
