In 2024, we released an all new plugin for Cinema 4D 2023+ that lets you browse, purchase, download, and import all your Poliigon assets with ease. Try it out below:
For more information and to download the legacy material converter, read below:
You can still download the legacy converter here.
Latest version: v1.6.4 Jan 18th, 2024 (Changelog)
This will automatically create a material out of your texture maps. It supports Cinema 4D R18 and up, with renderers; Arnold, Corona, Octane, Redshift, Physical, V-Ray, and ProRender.
How to install
Download the material converter .zip file and extract it into a folder on your computer.
In Cinema 4D, open the drop-down menu: Script\User Scripts and click "Run Script..."
Navigate to the unzipped material converter folder and select the "Installer_Poliigon_Material_Converter" script.
Once installed, restart Cinema 4D and then you will see the converter appear under the Plugins drop-down menu.
Usage
For more information regarding using our converter please check out the Cinema 4D area of our Help Section for tutorials on subjects ranging from basic usage to more in-depth subjects.
Textures folder
You may either select a single folder or the root folder that holds multiple texture sets. Once the folder has been chosen, the converter will detect and display how many supported materials were found. Once the textures have been converted, they will be saved to the Material Manager.
Renderer
You may choose between the following supported rendering engines:
(To ensure full compatibility, please use the latest versions of these renderers)
Arnold
Corona
Octane
Redshift *
Physical
V-Ray
ProRender
*Redshift users must manually tick the "Load as Metal" box before importing metal materials, otherwise they will not render correctly. Users still need to specify Specular maps to import.
Advanced options
Include Ambient Occlusion (AO) maps - If ambient occlusion maps are present with the detected materials, they will automatically be added to the material shader setup.
Include Displacement maps - If displacement maps are present with the detected materials, they will automatically be added to the material shader setup.
Conform UV maps to image dimensions - For textures in a rectangular (non-square) format, this option will adjust the UVs for each map type to match the image dimensions. Please note that this feature does not work with all rendering engines and is disabled by default.
Use 16 bit maps - This will replace all 8 bit images with higher quality 16 bit versions when available, and is disabled by default.
Apply materials to preview spheres - Enable this option to have each imported material appear on a standard sphere. This will allow you to quickly preview materials before applying them to your models. Please note this function is disabled by default.
Complete materials
The material converter is designed to function only when it detects materials that have a complete set of maps, and will give an error warning if one or more of these maps is missing. In order to form a complete material these four map types are required; COL (color), REFL (reflection), GLOSS, and NRM (normals).
Please note that some materials come with ALPHAMASKED files instead of a COL map and contain a transparency channel. These will automatically load in if a COL map is not detected.
Specialty maps
All other additional maps that may come with materials are considered specialty and not required for the converter to work. However some of these are directly supported such as AO, Displacement and Alphamasked maps.
Metal materials
When it comes to metal materials Poliigon offers two different workflows; metalness and specular.
The Material Converter for Cinema4D at this time only supports the specular workflow, due to some render engines in the past not supporting metalness. Please make sure to download this workflow to have the converter work properly.
Support
If you encounter any bugs while using the converter then please contact our support team with the details at support@polligon.com. Thanks!