Reverse material conversion function?

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I love the "Convert to Arnold material" function and use it all the time for models I import from 3DSMAX or cgtrader that don't come with Arnold materials. However, it would be extremely useful to also have the reverse function, to roughly convert Arnold materials to C4D materials (only considering the basic functions of the standard_surface node). This way you could quickly send the file to someone who does not have Arnold to look at the scene without having to rebuild everything from scratch and relink all the texture maps.

Do you have any ideas how a script for this would look or if it is even possible if you are not a developer of Arnold? Or would it be possible to include a feature like this in a future release within the right click context window?

[peter.horvath6V6K3]

Sure, makes sense. I can write you a script when I have some time and add it as a feature in a next release later.

[Anonymous]

Hi Peter, great thanks!

By the way, I use your "Refresh IPR" script 1000 times a day by now, I found out it is really useful to have the IPR on pause on more heavy, unresponsive scenes and just press the button when I need to refresh. So thanks for that 🙂

[peter.horvath6V6K3]

Cool. Glad to hear that script is useful. One day I should collect all this small utility scripts and ship with the plugin.

[Anonymous]

Definitely! There's probably a bunch of useful ones that have accumulated over time that nobody is aware of

[peter.horvath6V6K3]

Here's the first version of the converter script:

convert_arnold_material_to_c4d_material_v01.zip

It converts all standard_surface shaders from an Arnold Material to a C4D Material. Currently base, specular, transmission and emission parameters only and connected textures. Bump, normal maps and displacement maps are not supported yet. Layer shaders are not supported either. So one-to-one match is not guaranteed when you convert an Arnold Material to C4D Material and then back.

[Anonymous]

Wow, thank you, I will give it a try 🙂