9.5.2

804 • CHAPTER 18
MATERIAL MANAGER • 805
Render Materials, Render All Materials
To abort the rendering of the thumbnails, press the Esc key.
These commands redraw the thumbnails of the selected materials or all materials. Most of the time
you won’t need to use this command because new materials are rendered automatically. However,
when you save a scene, the thumbnails are compressed to reduce the scene’s le size. When you load
a scene, you may notice artefacts in some of the thumbnails. In such cases, use this command to
redraw the thumbnails. You’ll also need to use this command when importing foreign data formats
such as DXF and 3D Studio R4.
If you render the materials and only the base color is shown, it probably means that CINEMA 4D was
unable to nd the textures. The best way to avoid missing textures when moving scenes from one
computer to another is to use the Save Project command. This saves all of the textures used by the
scene in a ‘Tex’ folder within the scene’s folder.
New Material Group, Remove Material Group
By default, the Material manager displays all materials that are present in the scene. This is suitable
for small projects where there are only a few materials, but when you are working on a complex
scene that contain hundreds of materials, it can soon become a chore to nd the materials you want
to use or edit.
The solution is to sort the materials into material groups. You can then choose which material groups
are displayed in the Material manager.
First, create at least one material group using the New Material Group command (see below). You’ll
see a tab for each group appear at the top of the Material manager. Click a tab to display its materials
only. Shift-click a tab to display its materials in addition to the ones already displayed.
You can assign a material to one group only. Exception: each material is automatically assigned to
the All group as well.
To move a material from one group to another, drag the material onto the desired tab and wait for
the tab’s materials to appear. Now drop the material in the desired position.
When you delete a material from a group, the material is deleted completely.
In other words, it is also deleted from the All group.
A red tab name indicates that at least one of the tab’s materials is selected.
New Material Group
Creates a new material group. Use the dialog that opens to name the group. You’ll see a tab for the
new material group appear at the top of the Material manager. If this is the rst group you’ve created,
two other tabs will also be created at the same time: All and Others. The All group contains all the
materials in the scene. The Others group contains materials not yet assigned to one of the groups
you’ve created.