Cinema 4D Program Documentation Reference Cinema 4D Basic Features Extensions menu
Function available in CINEMA 4D Prime, Visualize, Broadcast, Studio & BodyPaint 3D

Substance

Allegorithmic’s Substance Designer is a powerful, node-based texture tool that is used to create procedural textures. The textures that are created (export them via the Publish command) are made available via a Substance file (with the extension *.sbsar) as assets for external programs. Cinema 4D can import these Substance files and use them as materials. In addition to Substances that can be purchased (e.g., www.allegorithmic.com/products/substance-source), Substances can also be downloaded for free (e.g., at share.allegorithmic.com).

Proceed as follows to load a Substance Asset:

Tip:
Note the options in the Preferences menu under Running Cinema 4D. There you can greatly speed up the texture calculation with your graphics card via OpenGL or Direct 3D.

How does a Substance Asset work in Cinema 4D?

A Substance Asset is created using the Substance Designer and generally consist of a number of nodes with numerous parameters. Within Substance Designer you can define which of these parameters should be "exposed". These parameters can be displayed and modified in Cinema 4D. The Substance Engine will calculate each modification and adapt the output texture accordingly.

All settings/outputs found in the Asset were defined in the Substance Designer (Substance: copyright Kay Vriend).

The Outputs menu contains all output textures made available to a Cinema 4D material by an Asset. By default, these will automatically be linked with the respective material channels via a special Substance shader.

The following Substance elements are available in Cinema 4D:

Substance Assets can be used anywhere in Cinema 4D, where a shader can be loaded, via the Substance shader. This includes the Displacement Deformers, layer shaders, etc. All you have to do is link a Substance in the shader and select the corresponding output channel. Any number of output channels can be defined in the Substance Designer that can be used anywhere in Cinema 4D.

If a project is passed on (also via Team Render), the *.c4d project file as well as the (linked) Substance file must be included. The Save Project with Assets... function can be used to help gather linked Assets.

Tip:
If the Standard Renderer is used to render an animation and grainy disruptions occur frequently, increase the antialiasing settings in the Render Settings menu (note also the Filter settings there).

If defined accordingly in the Substance Designer, textures can also be loaded into Cinema 4D within the Asset and apply Nodes to them (you only have to use a Color Image Input node in the Substance Designer, which will be displayed as a loadable texture in the Asset’s Image Inputs tab.), through which innumerable effects can be created.

If animations play too slowly in the Viewport when using Substances, the following measures may help:

Limitations