This page provides information about the supported features with Anima and Cinema 4D.

Supported Renders

When an Anima project is imported into Cinema 4D (either manually or using the Alive workflow), or when a model is sent to the scene using the Anima Drop panel, the Anima plugin will automatically adapt the materials of the actors to be compatible with the Render Engine that is selected at that moment in your C4D scene.

Therefore, you will be able to render right away, without needing to set up the materials manually, as long as you are using one of the supported Render Engines:


Material Types

After importing your Anima scene inside Cinema 4D, a pop-up window will display asking you if you want to assign materials to your actors.

  1. You will be asked to choose between 3 material presets, and the Regular material (color) option will be selected by default.




2. The Regular material (color) includes hyper-realistic textures, including normal, specular and opacity maps, ready for rendering.




3. Alternatively, you can select Plaster (white Lambertian) material to get a more neutral and abstract result.




4. Or choose the Semi-transparent option for an even more subtle presence of the actors in the renders.



Render Engines and Native Shaders

Not all the renderers we support in Cinema4D are using their own native shaders, only some of them.

This happens because the default shader definition in Cinema 4D is already compatible with Physically Based Render workflows (PBR), and most of the Render Engines are already compatible with them and only need a few tweaks in the material definition to ensure full compatibility.

On the other hand, with other Render Engines, we need to use their own native renderer materials because they have important issues supporting those standard C4D shaders.

We have tested the default C4D shaders with all the Render Engine supported, and this is the result:

Therefore, when using one of the Render Engines that work fine with the standard C4D shaders, the Anima plugin will not generate native shaders for your Render Engine but the final renders will look fine anyway because the plugin will adapt those standard parameters to make them compatible with your renderer (like adapting the normal map interpretation or tweaking the specular maps).

On the other hand, when using one of the Render Engines not compatible with the standard C4D shaders, Anima will generate native shaders and set them up automatically.

The correct Render Engine must be selected in Cinema4D before importing the Anima scene. If the scene has been already imported with a different renderer selected, then you have to manually select and remove all the Anima shaders and then reload the scene to regenerate the materials again to make sure that the materials have been correctly updated.