BLSmith

I made a simple Octane gradient texture that I wanted to look just like the black/white shader properties box, but in both render view and live view it has a gradient. Why is this? Is there a way to fix? I'm trying to simulate electricity flow. Thank you.

My memory is so bad that I just realized I asked this very question 8 months ago and Cerbera answered it perfectly. Here's that thread for anyone else seeing this and finds it helpful, otherwise, I'm perfectly fine having this thread deleted forever haha:

Hi there. I get CAD files from engineers that I texture and animate. Lately the models I've been getting have these instance tags on them: Is there a way, using some kind of a shortcut, to select the instanced object but the immediately select the original object? I know that I can press 'C' to make an instanced object editable, but I'm trying to find ways to improve my workflow and my thinking is, if I can find the source objects faster, I can texture the object faster because the instanced objects also change if the source changes. Another idea would be to hide ALL instances and only see sources and this way I can reduce complexity while only working with sources. Thanks so much!

3 years later this thread saved me AGAIN. Thank you once again @Bezo!

Thanks everyone. I will look into InstaLOD but it seems like what I've currently got in the best method. I also have access to PolyTrans64 with their Granite plugin that lets me export to STEP/save as C4D, unsure if that is the same type of program but it's what I've used at least in the past before C4D allowed importation of CAD. Just wanted to make sure I didn't begin all this labor needlessly. Every time I come back to animating a CAD I feel more and more strongly that I need to learn modeling and also learn more about a particular CAD program so that I can make changes. Kinda overwhelming, been putting it off for years, but it seems that this necessary at this point. Thanks all. I'll do what I can with what I got for now. Have a nice day.

Hi there. I'm new to importing Solidworks files into C4D. An engineer provided the CAD to me. I've never used CAD so I am not familiar with any of how it works. I am having trouble understanding why so much detail is lost when importing into C4D. The Solidworks file was a .zip, after I opened it, out came 300 Solidworks files (SLDASM). The engineer said only one main file out of the 300 will need to be accessed so it "references" all the other 299 files. The engineer told me to download a Solidworks viewer since I don't have Solidworks to get an idea what the model should look like. I downloaded a program called "eDrawings," and I opened the file suggested by the engineer and it opened just fine. I imported the main SLDASM file into Cinema4D, and all the material information was white! I asked the engineer to provide a STEP file instead, and this time it was clear that I now had a lot more material information to work with. The colors didn't match the ones in eDrawings, but I could easily tell the difference between plastic, aluminum, steel, etc. The problem is, there's a lot of data that seems to be lost or hidden. Some textures in eDrawings do not appear in Cinema4D, unless I go into Polygon mode and literally paint out the place where the texture should be and then assign it a new color. Some colors appear in Cinema4D that do not in eDrawing. It seems that there will be a lot of work needed to make this Cinema4D file look presentable, and I'm wondering if there is anything I can do to get the engineer to make my life easier. Here's a video on the above: Thanks very much.

I decided to create a tiny cube in the center and hid it inside the geometry, then I merged the cube with the attached file shape and the error went away. Thanks all.

Hi all. I'm apparently blind and unable to find where "xpcollider" is on this single object. I've removed everything I could but it's still giving me the error every time I open it. Can anyone inform me on what I'm missing? I have this project with 15,000 objects and this error has been driving me nuts, it took forever to pin it down to the object creating this mess. I no longer have X-Particles (I need to learn a new plugin for fire/smoke/liquid/compression), so I'd like to figure out how to make this error message go away so I can move forward. Thanks all in advance! BSmithError.c4d

Wow these ideas for working with CAD are seriously going to save me a lot of time, thank you thank you thank you! The client (for now) just wants exterior shots, but I want to open their eyes to the possibilities down the road with exploded views and animation which I can get into if they have me continue working with them after this first project, if I get it done quickly that'll work in my favor.

Oh my this was so much simpler than I realized. Thank you @Cerbera!

I have 10,000+ elements in a CAD I just imported that I had the engineer export in STP format. There are thousands of instance objects that seem to refer to an original source object, and if that source object is changed/textured, all of the instance objects also change. My question: I only want to see the original objects and make all the instanced objects disappear from the viewport so I know that whatever object I am looking at, is the source object rather than the instanced object? Addendum: It would be great also if they disappeared from the Object Manager, so there is orders of magnitude less objects to sort through in the material manager, and I'll just add them back once I am done. Thanks!

Hello @EAlexander sorry for the delayed response. I'm editing this reply because I read this and attempted your solution before reading MASH's solution. The answer to this question is they are colored because the DISPLAY COLOR in the BASIC tab of each object is set to custom. Hello @davetwo Thank you for this. I've never used CAD but your right, there is simply no way this is actually 10,000 actual objects. I wish I knew which options to focus on when importing, however. Hello @Mash! OMG THAT WORKED! It took FOREVER for it to load the dang textures but it worked. I guess the next thread will be about how to improve future CAD imports so there isn't so many elements (10,000+) and what I need to say to the engineer so that he can make my life easier. I'll need to focus on what to ask the forum though for a while because I can't articulate it well, but for now, this closes the thread. Thank you both for the time for helping me, and once again sorry for the delay. Edit: This pro tip from @EAlexander has now come in SUPER handy now that I have textures to manipulate. Thanks again!

I have a client that's given me a massive CAD (exported to me in .STEP), complete with over 10,000+ elements. I need to add materials this thing to make these generic colors look good. The good news is that the .STEP file has basic colors assigned. My goals are as follows: Select all the objects with identical colors. Assign them a material. Convert that material into an Octane Renderer Material. (Skip this step if I can go direct from Basic Color to Octane Texture). Repeat for all objects. If this is not possible, what can I ask this engineer to do within his CAD software to make this easier on me? My first thought is if he can select all identical colors in his CAD program and addendum on COLOR1, COLOR2, COLOR3, to the object names, I can just use the search field in Cinema4D to select all the materials with the same addendums and assign materials that way, but this seems overly complex for something that should be simple. Thanks so much!

I suspect you are correct. The problem was with Google's Backup & Sync software corrupting the files as they were each downloaded, upon manually downloading the files, they opened just fine. Very odd never expected that to be the culprit.

You started me down a crazy rabbit hole and I've discovered the culprit: Google Drive. Turns out, Google Backup & Sync, while downloading the cloud files, actually corrupted them all on my local system, it wasn't a read error on Cinema4D 2023 trying to open an file that was too old. However, if I downloaded the files manually from Google Drive the project loads perfectly fine. Here is a video recapping my discovery process if it helps anyone else. Thanks @HappyPolygon so much! (video may be processing)