OTOY Forums

Is there a way to keep Octane materials assigned to a model when exporting out of another program and importing into cinema?

Specifically, we work in both Maya and C4d and when building something in Maya and exporting as FBX, the octane materials don't stay assigned when importing into Cinema. The material TAGS are in place, so what we do is export materials from Maya to LocalDB, then download and manually apply to the correct material tags on the model. This isn't a huge deal for simple scenes but as you can imagine it's a nightmare to deal with on more complex scenes.

Is there any way of importing models from other programs with Octane Materials still assigned (any file format is fine--it doesn't have to be FBX). If it's not possible, is the problem on the Maya exporting side or the C4D importing side?

Hi,
OctaneRender Standalone has an FBX exporter that can save Octane materials, if they are Octane Univeral Materials, but unfortunately, C4D doesn't consider them in import:


Never tried, but Maxon has recently introduced USD support, try to export from Maya in USD, and import it in C4D 2024, maybe it could help

ciao,
Beppe

hmmm, doesn't seem like that works. but i'm not well versed in USD format so i could be doing something wrong but idk.

If this doesn't work, is the issue with importing an object with materials applied a root c4d issue or is it an an exporting issue (i.e. the exporting program doesn't export octane materials)? Basically i'm wondering if this is functionality that could be added to the C4D octane plugin or if it's a bigger issue than that.

Alembic shading groups allow for such workflow, but I'm unfamiliar with Cinema 4D and if it's a supported feature that several 3D DCCs do support, including Maya as well as Octane Standalone where the material assignation is semi-automatically set by a nomenclature, essentially.