Using Superellipse PBR Textures in Cinema 4D + Redshift
This guide will walk you through installing the Superellipse PBR Importer plugin and loading your texture packs into Cinema 4D as fully wired Redshift node materials — in seconds.
What You'll Need
Before getting started, make sure you have the following:
- Cinema 4D 2025.1.1 or newer
- Redshift renderer installed and active
- Windows or macOS
- The Superellipse PBR Importer. Download it here
Why the Plugin Exists
Cinema 4D has no native PBR importer for Redshift. When you purchase a Superellipse texture pack, you receive a folder of image maps — basecolor, roughness, metallic, normal, AO, height, and more. Without the plugin, combining those into a properly configured material means manually creating texture nodes, setting colour spaces, wiring every connection, and building AO compositing and displacement setups from scratch.
The Superellipse PBR Importer reduces the entire process to two clicks: run the plugin, select a folder, done.
Step 1 — Install the Plugin
Close Cinema 4D completely before copying the files.
Unzip the downloaded file Superellipse_C4D_Redshift_PBR_Importer.zip. Inside you'll find a folder called Superellipse Redshift — this is what you need to copy.
Copy the entire Superellipse Redshift folder into your Cinema 4D plugins directory. Replace [version] with your Cinema 4D version number — for example 2025 or 2026.
Windows
C:\Users\<YourName>\AppData\Roaming\Maxon\Maxon Cinema 4D [version]\plugins\
macOS
-
~/Library/Preferences/Maxon/Maxon Cinema 4D [version]/plugins/
Make sure you copy the entire Superellipse Redshift folder — not just the .py file inside it.
Can't find the plugins folder?
Open Cinema 4D, go to Edit > Preferences, then click Open Preferences Folder at the bottom left of the Preferences window. Navigate into the plugins subfolder — this is the correct location.
Reopen Cinema 4D once the folder is in place.
Step 2 — Import a Material
In Cinema 4D, go to Extensions > Import Material (Redshift).
A folder picker will appear. Navigate to your Superellipse texture folder and select it. The plugin remembers your last used location between sessions, so subsequent imports are even faster.
An options dialog will appear before the material is built:
-
Displacement — ticked by default. Wires the height map into a Displacement node ready to use. Set the Scale value to taste — default is 0.1 but this is scene and mesh dependent. To see displacement in the render, make sure your object has a Redshift Object tag with Geometry > Tessellation and Displacement both enabled.
- Triplanar Projection - Cinema 4D 2026.1+ only. Tick this for world-space projection that doesn't require a UV unwrap. Leave unticked to use standard UV mapping.
Click OK — the plugin takes over from here. Done!
The material is added directly to your scene and named automatically from the folder name. For example, Boucle_Fabric_Willow_4K becomes Boucle Fabric Willow — Superellipse. A confirmation dialog appears when everything is complete.
Housekeeping Note: Keep your unzipped texture folders in a permanent location before importing — the material references wherever the files are at the time of import, so moving them afterwards will disconnect the textures.
Step 3 — Apply the Material
Once the material appears in the Material Manager, drag it onto any object in your scene to apply it.
Open the Node Editor to inspect the graph. All texture nodes are named with the SE_ prefix so they're easy to identify at a glance.
Step 4 — Adjusting Tiling and Projection
Cinema 4D 2025 and earlier
All texture nodes share three master control nodes: SE_UV_Scale, SE_UV_Offset, and SE_UV_Rotate. Adjust Scale on that single node and every map — base color, roughness, normal, displacement — updates together consistently.
Scale — default 1. Adjusts tiling for all maps simultaneously.
Offset — default 0. 1.0 = 100% shift. To offset by 50% use 0.5 in either direction.
Rotation — default 0. Enter a value in degrees.
Cinema 4D 2026.1+
All texture nodes share a single SE_UV_Control node. Scale, Offset, and Rotation are built directly into this node — select it in the Node Editor and adjust from there.
If you imported with Triplanar Projection enabled, the material projects from world space without needing a UV unwrap. Switch to UV Channel at any time by changing the Projection Type on SE_UV_Control.
Batch Import
To import multiple materials at once, use Extensions > Import Batch (Redshift).
Select the parent folder containing your texture sets as subfolders — you can either click the folder to highlight it and press "select folder", or open it and press "select folder" from inside. The plugin then presents a scrollable checklist of every texture set it finds. Tick the sets you want — use Select All or Deselect All for large libraries — then click OK to import. You will also have the option to enable displacement across all selected materials in the next step.
A summary dialog confirms how many materials were created and flags any that failed.
Tips & Best Practices
Enabling Displacement
If a height map is detected, the plugin wires a Displacement node automatically. To see displacement in renders you also need to enable it on the object:
- Select and right click your object in the Object Tree
- In the popup, go to Render Tags > RS Object
- Select the RS Object Tag
- Under Geometry, enable Override, and enable Tessellation
- Set Subdivision Iterations to 3 or higher
- On the Material tag, enable the Displacement checkbox
Smart Defaults & Material Specifics
A few material parameters are set automatically based on what maps are present in your texture set, others are at artists direction and require additional settings being tweaked dependant on lighting and scene variables:
Clearcoat weight — 0.9 — (Carbon Fiber, Laquered wood, Car paint etc). Applied when clearcoat colour or roughness maps are found but no weight map. Gives a visible clearcoat effect out of the box. Adjust in the Standard Material node if needed.
Anisotropic strength — 0.6 — (Brushed metals, woven materials etc). Applied when an anisotropic angle map is present but no weight map. Ensures the anisotropic highlight is visible. Raise toward 1.0 for stronger brushed metal or carbon fibre effects.
SSS & Transmission — (Glass, wax, resins etc). In complex transmissive materials, there are various key settings to explore. Whilst the importer applied defaults, it's good practice to understand the variables that will help create the expected art direction given your lighting, scene set up, and object geometry.
Transmission Depth — How deep the colour sits inside the material. Low values = colour close to the surface. High values = more optical depth. Scale to your object size.
Dispersion — Splits light into spectral colours through the material. 0 = off. 10 = glass. 70 = diamond. Leave at 0 for standard clear glass.
Subsurface Radius — How far light scatters under the surface per RGB channel. Controls the colour bleed of the scatter. Default is neutral grey — tint per channel for skin, wax, resin etc.
SSS Scale — Overall intensity/softness of the SSS effect. Higher = softer and more translucent. Lower = denser. Default 1.4. Scale up for wax or milk, down for rubber or dark resin.
Emission weight — 0.0 — always set to zero when no emission map is present. Prevents unwanted glow from Redshift's material defaults.
All of these can be overridden directly in the node graph after import.
Supported Channels
The plugin automatically detects and wires the following maps when present in your texture folder:
Base Color, Roughness, Metallic, Normal, Ambient Occlusion, Height / Displacement, Opacity, Emission, Specular, Anisotropic Weight, Anisotropic Angle, Clearcoat Weight, Clearcoat Colour, Clearcoat Roughness, Transmission Weight, Transmission Colour, Subsurface Weight, Subsurface Colour
Troubleshooting
The plugin doesn't appear in the Extensions menu — confirm the Superellipse folder was placed in the correct plugins directory and that Cinema 4D was fully closed before copying. The folder itself must be inside plugins/ — not the .py file directly.
No maps found — check that your texture filenames have been unaltered since download. The C4D console (Extensions > Console) will list any files that were skipped.
Textures appear missing or pink after import — the material references the original location of your texture folder. If you have moved, renamed, or deleted that folder since importing, Cinema 4D will no longer find the image maps. Re-run the plugin pointing to the new folder location to reimport fresh.
Displacement isn't showing in renders — see the Enabling Displacement section above. Three additional settings on the RS Object tag and Material tag are required before displacement renders.
Batch import finds 0 sets — the batch tool scans one level of subfolders. Make sure your texture sets sit as direct subfolders of the parent folder you selected — not nested deeper.
Questions?
If you run into anything not covered here, reach out at support@superellipse.co and include the name of the texture pack you were importing, along with the software version.
