Asset Error when rendering

[Steve Bentley]

You might be stuck. When some of these 3D providers transcode the models to another format (maya to C4D for instance) they don’t always ensure that the textures, or even the hierarchies remain intact. It could also be that a different 3D package maps them differently and the transcode can’t accommodate that mapping.

What you can try though is to make sure the folder where the textures reside is in the list of texture folders C4D knows (that list is in the C4D preferences and you can customize it).

You can also try making a folder called “tex” and putting is right next to the C4D file on your drive and put all the textures in it. Then fire up that file and see what happens.

Finally, it might be a naming convention. Check that the names C4D is asking for match what the name of the texture is. Often the textures are old or coming from a country who has different characters on their keyboards and the naming gets changed to accommodate a different OS, or substitutions are made to replace characters that are not allowed.

[Ellen Donnelly]

Thank you!
The C4D folder had a “tex” folder that was empty. I brought all the textures in and now it works perfectly, but render times are so long!

[Steve Bentley]

Many times, purchased 3D assets will not be optimized for the fastest render times or for the package you have transcoded the file to, instead going for the best looking renders (often GI or using specific high-end render engines) and that can massively up the render times.
GI renders are truly stunning when done correctly but are not always needed

Materials included with these assets are often more complicated than they need to be (or have been made complicated because the originating package could pull off an effect natively while C4D can’t) or use displacement instead of geometry. It used to be that a texture was worth a thousand polygons, but these days with displacement shaders, a texture might just make 10,000 polygons during the render stage to gain the detail the material needs – and that tessellation of the geometry happens every single frame of the render – it’s quite time consuming.
While a frame is rendering, look at the bottom left of the picture viewer and see what the processors are crunching on the most.

Learn the basics of lighting and materials, then learn some tricks to fake GI. Things will render soooo much faster. There is nothing like a GI based render but I find it gets used as a big red single render-button crutch for those who want to go from 0 to 100 miles an hour in their learning cycle and skip all the hard work. If you know how something works, you can make it do much more than it was originally designed for.