Using Superellipse PBR Textures in Cinema 4D + Octane

This guide will walk you through installing the Superellipse PBR Importer plugin and loading your texture packs into Cinema 4D as fully wired Octane node materials — in seconds.

What You'll Need

Before getting started, make sure you have the following:

• Cinema 4D 2025.1.1 or newer
• Octane 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 Octane. 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_Octane_PBR_Importer.zip. Inside you'll find a folder called Superellipse Octane — this is what you need to copy.

Copy the entire Superellipse Octane 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 Octane 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 > Superellipse > Import Material (Octane).

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 Octane Object tag with Geometry > Tessellation and Displacement both enabled.
  

• Assign to selected object - Tick this to assign the material to the currently selected object. The tool will create a new material tag on the object with the material assigned. Note, in v1 of this tool you must select the target object before running the importer.

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 or renaming 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 Octane 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

All texture nodes share a single master control node: SE_UV_Transform. Adjust any value on that one node and every map — base color, roughness, normal, displacement — updates together consistently.

Scale — default (1, 1, 1). Controls tiling for all maps simultaneously. Increase to tile more frequently, decrease to stretch.

Translation — default (0, 0, 0). Offsets the UV position. A value of 1.0 equals a full 100% shift in that axis. To offset by 50%, enter 0.5.

Rotation — default (0, 0, 0). Rotates the UV projection. Enter values in degrees.

One note: the Octane Transform node stores all three as Vector values (X, Y, Z) rather than separate scalar nodes. For standard flat UV work you'll only need X and Y on Scale and Translation — Z can be left at its default.

Batch Import

To import multiple materials at once, use Extensions > Import Batch (Octane).

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

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:

Displacement 

On the SE_Displacement node, adjust the Height value to control the depth of the displacement effect. The right value depends on your scene scale and geometry — start low and increase until the detail reads correctly in your render.

For finer surface detail, open the Quality tab and switch from Normal to High.

The Level of Detail setting defaults to 1024×1024. Raising this to 2048×2048 or 4096×4096 will bring out more depth and sharpness in the displacement, particularly useful for close-up renders of fabric or leather — though it will increase memory usage accordingly.

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 Material node under the "Coating Layer" tab - "Coating" value if needed.

Normal Strength — If the normal map is too dominant for your scene, you can alter the intensity of the height simulation by lowering the "Power" value on the normal map texture node.

Anisotropic strength — Default 0.6 — (Brushed metals, woven materials, carbone fiber, car paint 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. Found under the materials "Anisotropy" tab.

Transmission / Glass

When a transmission colour map is detected, the plugin creates a Mix Texture node wired into the Transmission channel, with your colour map as Texture1 and a white RGB node as Texture2.

Amount — defaults to 0, which outputs your colour map at full strength — deeply tinted glass. Raise toward 1.0 to blend toward white, reducing the colour intensity until the glass appears clear. This controls tint depth only — the glass remains fully transmissive at both extremes.

Transmission Type — set automatically to Specular, which is correct for solid glass. Switch to Thin Wall for flat surfaces like window panes or glass panels where you don't want refraction depth.

IOR — Index of refraction. Default 1.5 for glass, 1.33 for water, 2.4 for diamond. Found on the material's Basic tab.

Octane limitation — Unlike Corona or Octane, Octane's Universal Material does not support depth-based colour absorption (Beer-Lambert falloff) in the Transmission channel. This means thin and thick areas of glass will appear the same colour depth. For physically accurate depth-based tinting — where thicker glass appears darker — you would need to add an Absorption Medium node manually to the Medium channel and set the absorption colour there. For most Superellipse glass packs the Mix node approach gives excellent results without this extra step.

Subsurface Scattering (Wax, Skin, Resin)

When an SSS colour map is detected, the plugin creates a Scattering medium node wired into the Medium channel, with your colour map driving the Scattering slot.

Density — default 100. Controls how many scattering particles are present in the medium. Higher values make the material appear denser and more opaque. Lower values allow more light to pass through. This is the first thing to adjust if SSS looks too heavy or too subtle.

Scattering — driven by your SSS colour map. Controls the colour and direction of light scattering beneath the surface. The colour of the map determines what wavelengths scatter — warm red/orange for skin, yellow for wax, amber for resin.

Absorption — unset by default. Wire a colour or texture here to tint the light that is absorbed rather than scattered. Useful for layered effects like resin with a different surface colour to its interior.

Single Scatter Amount — default 1. Controls the contribution of single-scattering events (light that scatters once and exits). Reduce for a softer, more diffuse look.

Phase — default 0 (isotropic, scatters equally in all directions). Positive values push scattering forward (toward the viewer), negative values push it backward. Leave at 0 for most materials.

Octane limitation — Octane's scattering medium does not have a simple radius or scale value like other engines. Scatter depth is controlled indirectly through Density and the scene unit scale of your object. If the SSS effect looks too large or too small, adjust Density first — for a physically large object like a rock, lower the density significantly; for a small candle, the default of 100 is a reasonable starting point.

Emission weight — 0.0 — always set to zero when no emission map is present. Prevents unwanted glow from Octane'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.

Glass isn't rendering as transparent — confirm your render kernel is set to Path Tracing. The Direct Lighting kernel does not support refraction. Also check that the material's IOR value is above 1.0 on the Basic tab.

Displacement isn't showing in renders — the plugin wires the displacement node automatically. If it isn't rendering, first check that your render kernel is set to Path Tracing — the Direct Lighting kernel does not support displacement. If the effect is too subtle or too strong, adjust the Height value on the SE_Displacement node; the default is conservative and will likely need increasing to match your scene scale. For finer detail, raise the Level of Detail setting on the same node from its default of 1024×1024.

Batch import finds 0 sets — confirm you selected the parent folder containing your texture set subfolders, not a texture folder itself. If that's correct, the console will show what was scanned. The plugin handles one level of nested zip folders automatically, but sets nested more than two levels deep won't be detected.

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.