---- 2022-11-22 ----

Quicktip: c4d – workflow with multiple materials

If you have to render an object with different materials, you can either change everytime the material by hand or you can use this little xpresso script and „takes-manager“ to automate your renders. There are for sure other methods, but this works quite well for me.

(In my case i had like 30 different products to render, each with 10 different main colors. )

You would set up your products and then animate the user-data-input in your timeline. You can also extend you data to more materials-slots or connect it to more link-lists … and so on.

example setup

add material to your objects or objects

add xpresso-tag

add – user data to your object or Null

name: „what you like“
type: integer
interface: cycle button

The order of the items is important for later, the names not really, it´s just for you

move your object and material/s into the expresso editor

add node: link-list

activate node-port USER_DATA on your object and select your user-data …. from before. in my case „Data-material“

on the material-node you activate the port > Tag Properties > Material

select the node link-list and move your selected materials into the list

>> as mentioned before, the names are not that important, but the order

Final setup, which you can now animate in your timeline and in combination with the „takes-manager“ you can „automate“ your renders. I setup 1 take, duplicate it and just modify the visiblity of each product like needed.