Substance Engine

Here you will find the preferences settings for the Substance function.

Version

This is the Substance Engine version, which only serves informational purposes.

Active Substance Engine

This is also purely informative.

Details can be found under Running Cinema 4D (see below). If you change engines a prompt will be displayed showing which engine will be used the next time Cinema 4D is started.

Create material on import

Here you can define if a material should be created right away when a Substance file is loaded, which will then be listed as an asset in the Substance Asset Manager.

The following options are available:

• None: No material will be created
• Standard; Metallic; Glossy: A standard, metallic or glossy material will be created
• Auto: The following materials will be created based on the texture provided by the asset: If metallic AND rough, a metallic material will be created; if glossy then a glossy material will be created; if none of these combinations exists, a standard material will be created.

Details about metallic, glossy and standard materials can be found here.

Sampling

This setting should be familiar to you from the normal Cinema 4D textures when working with bitmaps. Details can be found under Interpolation. MIP and SAT mapping are not supported.

Disk Cache Mode

Use this setting to define if a hard drive cache should automatically be written/read (see also Disk Cache menu).

The following options are available:

• Off: The disk cache will not be used. This will result in some scenes taking very long to load.
• Read: The disk cache will be loaded automatically when the scene is loaded. Apart from that, nothing will be saved automatically. You have complete control over the disk cache. However, the textures and the settings may not be synchronized correctly for newly loaded scenes, which can become evident when the scene is rendered. It will be faulty. What can help is calling up the Reload Substances command (Substance Asset Manager: File menu) or changing the asset settings (the textures will be updated in the RAM).
• Read+Write: The disk cache will be read automatically when the scene is loaded and the textures of modified assets will be saved automatically when the file is saved.

Disk Cache Format

Use this setting to define the format in which the asset textures should be saved in the disk cache.

Note that compression artifacts can be created in JPEGs of the smallest possible file size, which can be visible when rendered. PNG and TIFF can be saved loss-free, whereby TIFF is not compressed at all.

Asset textures saved in other formats will be ignored by the Substance Cache System. These should be deleted manually to reduce the overall size of your scene’s directory. Note also that 16/32-bit support only works in the respective formats if the format is also supported: TIFF up to 32-bit, PNG up to 16-bit and JPEG 8-bit.

Cache Shaders for Viewport

If animations run slow in the Viewport when substances are used (see also here), enabling this option can help speed things up (however, only if the asset’s texture resolution (mostly in the Basic Properties tab is not equal to that of the material (Viewport tab). A pre-rendered bitmap will then be cached for each Substance shader that is applied, which speeds up the Viewport view. A disadvantage is the increased amount of RAM that is required.

Output Channel Preview Size

This setting defines the size of the asset texture preview that is displayed in the Attribute Manager.

Content Browser preview

An asset can be dragged and dropped into the Content Browser’s preset library. Since presets have a preview image, these options can be used to define how they should look:

• Rendered: Rendered on a sphere
• Output Channel Mosaic: Displayed as a surface mosaic with all output channels

Running Cinema 4D

Here you can switch between software (CPU) rendering (SSE2) and accelerated graphics cards (GPU) rendering (OpenGL on macOS or Direct3D on Windows) for the assets. The GPU acceleration refers to the rendering of the output channels, e.g., when parameters are modified.

The following should be noted:

• The output channels often differ from one another due to differing render methods between CPU and GPU (e.g., differences in detail such as a different grain (noise), among other things). These are for the most part not identical! Make sure the same engines are used when using Team Render (see next section).

If a different engine is selected, Cinema 4D must be restarted. The engine currently being used is displayed at the top of the menu in the Active Substance Engine field. A warning prompt will be displayed in the Substance Asset Manager if a different engine is selected and Cinema 4D has not yet been restarted.

Team Render Clients
Synchronize Team Render Clients

This selection menu can only be defined in the Team Render Server.

As explained in the text field below, all Clients must use the same engine when running Team Render because render results can differ if different engines are used.

Instead of running to each Client, the settings can simply be defined in the Team Render for all Clients. Don’t forget to click on the Synchronize Team Render Clients button. Afterwards, all Team Render Clients must be restarted (this can be easily done in the Team Render Server interface in the Network menu), which should then all be using the same engine.

What if Clients don’t have the required engine? In this case, other available engines will be used.

This will be done in the following order:

• macOS: Direct 3D -> OpenGL -> SSE2
• Windows: OpenGL -> Direct 3D 11 -> Direct 3D 10 -> Direct 3D 9 -> SSE2

If the defined engine is not available, the next engine in the order described will be used. Example: The Team Render Server requires OpenGL, and a Windows Client can’t accommodate this, so it uses Direct 3D 11. If the Client also doesn’t have Direct 3D then SSE2 will be used.

If different engines have to be used, an error prompt will be displayed (either in a separate window or in the Team Render Server console).