Surfaces will be converted to CINEMA 4D Exchange materials during the first export, and CINEMA 4D Exchange materials will be converted into Surfaces during every return process. As ARCHICAD and CINEMA 4D Exchange have different approaches to modeling materials, the conversions may suffer data loss in some cases. However, once an object has been edited or created in CINEMA 4D Exchange and then converted to a GDL object, the GDL object’s parameters will include the CINEMA 4D Exchange material settings, so no data loss will occur in subsequent freeform editing processes.
Note: In case of bitmap textures, the bitmap images are stored in the “tex” folder next to the CINEMA 4D Exchange project file. To avoid missing textures in the object, do not remove this folder or its content.
Although ARCHICAD and CINEMA 4D Exchange have different ways of projecting textures, projections are converted during export. UVW mapping information is also stored with the CINEMA 4D Exchange polygon objects, so if you find that a converted projection of a texture is not exact enough for your needs, you can select “UVW Mapping” as projection in the object’s texture tag. For objects that will act as solids in ARCHICAD, you should use projected textures instead of UVW mapping, because GDL objects with solid operation capabilities can be displayed correctly in ARCHICAD only if they use projected textures. If you create an object that won’t take part in a solid operation in ARCHICAD, you can use UVW mapped textures and choose “preserve textures” as the Model Behavior setting of the retrieved GDL object (see below).
Limitations:
•If the element’s polygons are grouped “by Material” in the hierarchy, only UVW mapping can be used for the texture projection.
•The current version uses only the Internal Rendering Engine settings of the Surfaces. As reflectivity is not supported by the Internal Rendering Engine, the export process considers highly shiny Surfaces to be reflective, while the less shiny Surfaces are converted to CINEMA 4D Exchange materials with specular light properties.
If no hotspots are defined in CINEMA 4D Exchange, ARCHICAD’s default hotspots will be shown with the returned GDL object. You can bypass the defaults and define custom hotspots by following these steps:
1.Create a Null object in CINEMA 4D Exchange and change its name to “Hotspot”.
2.Move it to the desired location in the Editor windows.
It will be converted into a 3D hotspot in the ARCHICAD GDL object and will be located at the exact position of the CINEMA 4D Exchange Hotspot object.