Not sure if I'm too late to the party, or if everybody has been able to figure this out for themselves already. Either way, I wanted to share my findings.
I have been looking into combining my Quixel Suite workflow with Octane Render in Cinema 4D for the longest while. Of course, there are a couple "MBB_Quixel_PBR" materials in LiveDB, but as most people found out, once you opened them in the Node Editor, you were presented with a bit of a mess. Worse yet, none of the Image Texture nodes gave any indication, what would be plugged into each of them.
Chris Mills was kind enough to provide an Expresso-based solution to the problem (big thanks to him again), though I realised that this caused quite a bit of loading time, whenever you opened one of the C4D files containing such a Quixel/Octane/Expresso setup. Worse yet, I had a master scene, referencing two dozen XRefs, each containing this Expresso setup. Rest assured, I had to wait for 5min and longer for all the materials to load.
After playing around with ways to improve and speed up my workflow, I checked the various Quixel PBR materials on LiveDB again. They looked still as scary as before, but I came across an addition, namely the "MBB_Quixel_PBR_Plugins" material.
As it turns out, the Image Texture nodes in this one have dummy file paths, which describe whether an Albedo, Metalness, Roughness, Normal or Displacement map should go in there. That was all the info I needed.
I spent some time decluttering the node tree and cleaning up redundant nodes (a lot of the Image Texture nodes are doubled up). Eventually that left me with 5 Image Texture nodes, which I then connected to one global transform node.
And there you have it, a ‘clean’, ‘un-hacked’ Quixel PBR material in Cinema 4D that loads super-quick and - according to my tests - looks 95-99% similar to the image I get in 3DO. I’d say that’s as good as it gets. If you'd like to download the project file, here's a link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ait46ed7osuqthl/MBB_Quixel_PBR_Plugins_Simplified.c4d?dl=0
Just copy the three materials into your project and hook the Mix Material up to your object. While you've got the Mix Material in the Material Editor, click on the Node Editor button, which will present you with my reworked graph, where you can connect your various Quixel PBR maps as discussed.
I hope this will help some of you, who are into the Quixel/Octane workflow as well. And of course, I’d appreciate any comments or criticism, in case what I cooked up here is still flawed in some ways, though after my tests, I’ve got a pretty good feeling about this.
