Which material is this?
OpenPBR vs. the Standard Material, and where the settings are
In Cinema 4D 2026, creating a Redshift material gives you an OpenPBR Material. It
follows OpenPBR, an open standard shared across renderers and applications, so a material built on
it describes the same surface in the same terms elsewhere. Redshift's older Standard
Material is still available and uses different names for many of the same ideas - its
Reflection is OpenPBR's Specular, its Sheen is OpenPBR's Fuzz.
Two things catch people out:
- You can reach these settings two ways. Select the material in the Material
Manager and its Base Properties, Redshift Optimizations and Redshift Advanced tabs show them,
next to the material's own Viewport and Assign tabs. Or open the Node Editor and click the
OpenPBR Material node, which shows the same settings plus the node's own Preview and
Basic tabs.
- Nothing on this material ever greys out. A layer with Weight 0 is off, but its
settings stay editable, and so do the trace depth rows while their override is off, and the rows
a Subsurface Mode or Thin Walled makes irrelevant. Changing them does nothing. Each description
says what a setting needs before it has an effect.
Click any setting on the left to see what it does. Nearly all the
look lives on Base Properties: start with Base Color, Metalness and Specular Roughness.
Rows with only a small circle are sockets - they take a node wired in from the Node
Editor, such as a bump map, and have no value of their own.
Looking for something specific? Use the search box. It knows the words you would use,
not just C4D's labels - glass finds Transmission, velvet finds Fuzz.