OTOY Forums

I have a LightWave model that I’d like to port over to Cinema 4D. The model is in LW 2018 *.lwo format and has 244 OctaneRender materials.

If I export the model to OBJ using the exporter in LightWave Modeler, I can open the model in Cinema 4D and the material assignments to the polygons are intact, but the OctaneRender material definitions themselves are lost. I suppose that makes sense; Cinema 4D can only read the materials that LightWave saved to the *.mtl materials file during the OBJ export process. And of course, LightWave’s OBJ exporter only saves the OpenGL node settings that I defined in my OctaneRender material nodes; it ignores the OctaneRender stuff.

Before I manually reapply 244 sets of OctaneRender material settings in C4D, is there any automated (or even semi-automated!) tool that can help me port these materials over? Is there a better way to do this than exporting to OBJ? Thanks...

You can export to ORBX and load that as proxy model e in C4D and it'll have all materials too. You won't be able to adjust/change them native in C4D but will look same so if this is not something you want to do many times just be sure all materials are set correctly and export to ORBX format from LW. Basically it's nice way for sharing static meshes between DCC apps with Octane render.

Yes, I agree. Exporting the object to a .orbx file to try to use it directly in C4D as a proxy object is the best workflow. If you need to edit a material, you can do it in Standalone if needed.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

The models will be modified in Cinema 4D once they’ve been ported over. The ORBX approach won’t work, since I can’t modify the models in C4D.

Pretend that LightWave is about to disappear off the face of the Earth, and that you need to get an *.lwo object with hundreds of OctaneRender surfaces migrated over to C4D with as much of its texturing intact as possible. How would you go about doing this?

No way to do that AFAIK.