This guide will walk you through installing the Superellipse PBR Importer plugin and loading your texture packs into Cinema 4D as fully wired Corona Physical Materials — in seconds.
What You'll Need
Before getting started, make sure you have the following:
- Cinema 4D 2025.1.1 or newer
- Chaos Corona 14 or newer
- Windows or macOS
- The Superellipse PBR Importer for Cinema 4D Corona. Download it here
Why the Plugin Exists
Cinema 4D has no native PBR importer for Corona. 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 Corona Physical Material means manually creating bitmap shaders, setting colour spaces on every map, wiring each connection, and configuring channels like clearcoat, anisotropy, glass, and displacement 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_Corona_PBR_Importer.zip. Inside you'll find a folder called Superellipse - Corona — this is what you need to copy.
Copy the entire Superellipse - Corona 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 - Corona folder — not just the .pyp 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 > Superellipse > Import Material (Corona).
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:
- Composite AO into Base Colour — ticked by default. Multiplies the ambient occlusion map over the base colour, adding subtle contact shadowing in crevices. Untick if you prefer to handle AO manually or want a clean base colour.
- Enable Displacement — unticked by default. Tick this to activate height-based displacement immediately on import. See the Displacement section below for what else is needed in your scene.
- Use Node Material — coming soon.
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 4K — 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 Material Editor to inspect the setup. All texture nodes are named with the SE_ prefix so they're easy to identify at a glance — SE_BaseColor, SE_Roughness, SE_Normal, and so on.
The material parameters are also accessible directly via the Base Layer, General, and other tabs in the standard material editor — both views reflect the same setup.
Step 4 — Adjusting Tiling
Each texture node in the material has its own tiling controls built in. To adjust tiling, select a texture node in the Node Material Editor and update the Tiles U and Tiles V values. To scale all maps at once at the scene level, apply a C4D Texture Tag to your object and adjust the projection settings there.
Tips & Best Practices
Enabling Displacement
If a height map is detected, the plugin wires it automatically with a default range of −0.1 cm / +0.1 cm. Displacement is off by default — to enable it, open the material, go to the Displacement tab and tick Enable. You can also tick Enable Displacement in the options dialog at import time.
Adjust the Min Level and Max Level values to control intensity. The defaults suit fine detail like fabric and leather — increase for more pronounced depth. For subdivision quality at render time, add a Corona Displacement Modifier tag to your object via right-click > Corona Tags > Displacement Modifier.
Glass Materials
For glass and transparent materials, the plugin automatically enables Refraction and wires the transmission colour map into Corona's Volumetrics system.
Glass colour depth
The colour of the glass is driven by the transmission colour map and lives in Volumetrics > Absorption color. The key control is the Distance value, which defaults to 0.4 cm:
- A smaller Distance condenses the colour — the glass appears darker and more saturated
- A larger Distance allows more light through — the glass appears lighter and clearer
- Match the Distance to the approximate physical thickness of your glass object in the scene
Smoked and milky glass
For smoked, frosted, or milky glass, both a transmission colour (absorption) and a subsurface scatter colour are wired automatically when both maps are present. These work together in Volumetric mode to give the glass internal depth and a cloudy quality — no additional setup is needed.
Anisotropy
Anisotropy controls the directional stretching of reflections — common in brushed metals, carbon fibre, and satin fabrics.
Full sets (weight + angle maps)
When both an anisotropic weight map and an anisotropic angle map are present, both are wired automatically. The weight map drives per-pixel intensity at full strength.
Older sets (angle map only)
Some older Superellipse texture sets include only a single anisotropy map. In this case the plugin sets a default anisotropy weight of 0.5 (50%). To adjust, open the material and go to Base Layer > Anisotropy > Value. Increase toward 1.0 for a stronger effect, decrease toward 0 to soften it.
Batch Import
To import multiple materials at once, use Extensions > Superellipse > Import Batch (Corona).
Select a parent folder containing your texture sets as subfolders. The plugin scans one level deep and presents a scrollable checklist of everything it finds. Tick the sets you want — use Select All or Deselect All for large libraries — then click OK.
A summary dialog confirms how many materials were created and flags any that failed.
Supported Maps
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, 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 - Corona 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 .pyp file directly. Also confirm that Chaos Corona is installed and loaded — the plugin shows a warning if Corona is not detected.
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 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 — make sure you have ticked Enable in the material's Displacement tab, and that you have added a Corona Displacement Modifier tag to the object for subdivision at render time.
Glass colour has no effect — check that the Distance value in Volumetrics > Absorption is not zero. A Distance of 0 produces no volumetric effect regardless of the colour map. The plugin defaults to 0.4 cm.
Normal map looks inverted — bumps appear as dents — this is unlikely with standard Superellipse texture sets. If it occurs, open the material, go to Base Layer > Bump > Texture, click through to the Corona Normal shader, and under Channels Direction try toggling Flip Y (green).
Colours look washed out or roughness looks wrong — this is a colour space issue. The plugin sets colour spaces automatically, so this should not occur on imported materials. If setting up a material manually: Base Colour and Emission maps should use sRGB; all other maps (Roughness, Metalness, Normal, Height, AO, Opacity, Anisotropy) should use Linear. Setting a data map to sRGB, or a colour map to Linear, is the most common cause of incorrect material response in Corona.
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 your Cinema 4D and Corona version numbers.
