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How to create two sided materials?
 
Hello Kirgman,
It seems I can't create two sided materials in Centileo. I have a plane and I want texture on its front and silver material on its back. I am looking something similar to c4d default front,back, both check box in material. Or a node that can define the same function.

It seems like centileo is not recognizing the side selection.
Edited: thrimanakatha - Apr 3, 2022 02:59
 
Quote
thrimanakatha wrote:
Hello Kirgman,
It seems I can't create two sided materials in Centileo. I have a plane and I want texture on its front and silver material on its back. I am looking something similar to c4d default front,back, both check box in material. Or a node that can define the same function.

It seems like centileo is not recognizing the side selection.
does it work if you add a cloth surface and give it some thickness?

I don't suppose you're able to select the polygon surface of one side and set Selection tag to use with one of the materials?
 
I didn't check with cloth surface, however I added very thin thickness by extruding the plane and added different material via poly selection tag.
It will be easy if Centileo support c4d side selection, or some node like ray switch.
I found a node called Surface Side, but don't know how to use it. May be it has some other functionality.
Anyway I am rendering the animation now. Once finished I will update.
 
Administrator  Posts: 895
Apr 3, 2022 08:21
It's very simple to do. There should be a Mix Material which can combine two materials Primary and Secondary. There is also a port Primary Amount. So you should connect CentiLeo Surface Side node to this "Primary Amount" port.
After that Primary become Front and Secondary become Back material.
CentiLeo Chat: https://t.me/centileochat
 
Thanks,
It works. Actually I tried surface side node the same way you mentioned, for some reason it didn't work on my mesh. I tried on new scene, it worked.
I figured out the problem,
The plane has thickness applied so the two side material couldn't show its charm.
 
Administrator  Posts: 895
Apr 3, 2022 09:10
That probably because in that old case there were 2 surfaces not a single like in a real plane.
This surface side node is based on the face normal, so it works only when we have one surface and can look at front and back side of it.
CentiLeo Chat: https://t.me/centileochat
 
Hello Kirgman,
I have another doubt.
I have several centileo materials created and imported in the scene. I want to mix them with material mix node. I created a mix material node as usual but I couldn't drag/drop other centileo material in to the node editor. Recreating all the material for each mix material is time consuming.

Also the bitmap node can't reuse the imported textures. Converting a scene with different textures is time consuming. I have to jump between centileo bitmap node and c4d texture to figure out which texture is applied and then browsing and selecting them inside centileo bitmap node.
A texture history selection inside the bitmap might solve the issue. Corona has this feature. Blender image texture node has this feature.
 
Administrator  Posts: 895
Apr 3, 2022 11:11
Actually this is the limitation of Cinema 4D itself that is not related to CentiLeo. The node space of one material doesn't intersect with another material node space, so you can't link one node material inside another node material. You have to copy-paste the necessary parts of nodes into another node material. This linking is possible in 3ds Max, but not in Cinema 4D.

For old style menu based materials I have made a workaround where the other scene materials can be referenced as links in the multi-material.
But in node space materials we have to copy-paste your created materials into another "collection" material node space where you will mix them using multi-material.
I hope that Maxon guys will integrate the "linking" field for nodes so we will be able to reference something from outside of this node.

But despite of this drawback in C4D there is also an interesting feature in Cinema 4D nodes. You can create your own assets using your settings that you create for glass, ice or leather or anything else and save as assets. These assets once saved will be available for the next launches of your Cinema 4D.
Also you can create complex node networks and unite them using the group node and for this group node you can build own input/output ports that will be shorter than for example the whole centileo std material 40 ports. And then reuse these saved groups for other projects and inside multi-materials.

Quote
thrimanakatha wrote:
Also the bitmap node can't reuse the imported textures. Converting a scene with different textures is time consuming.
Oh yes, I know this. This is a huge problem, and it slows down the adoption of CentiLeo for users. But we will fix this and make some material conversion tools next after we finish the current ongoing release.
CentiLeo Chat: https://t.me/centileochat
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