Material Series 

Version 1.0, Updated August 2025 using Octane 2025.1.2 and Cinema 4D 2025.3.1
~6,800 words, average read time: 40 min

About this guide

This guide goes over the Standard Surface Material. It’s mostly plugin-agnostic, but there are a few cases where it uses C4D to show off what the node structure looks like or to call out some caveats. The knowledge should be easily transferrable to Blender, Houdini, etc.

Part I

Introduction to the Standard Surface Material

Quick History - What Is It?

The Standard Surface material spec was created by Autodesk, and has been the main material type for Arnold since 2017. Redshift has since adopted it as their default material, and it’s also available in V-Ray and Renderman, making it - as intended - a pretty well standardized material type.

Octane introduced the Standard Surface material type in the 2022 release and has been refining it ever since. It’s not the “default” type in Octane, and it doesn’t replace the Universal Material or of the other material types - it’s just another tool in the belt.

It’s important to note here that the implementation of Standard Surface differs from render engine to render engine. It may have a similar layout for the inputs and controls, but it’s not doing anything to change the actual render engine, so an unbiased spectral engine like Octane will still look quite different from a biased RGB engine like Redshift, or an unbiased RGB engine like Arnold, even if the all the sliders in the material are set exactly the same.

Why Should You Use It?

If you’re coming from Redshift, Arnold, V-Ray, or Renderman (or spend part of your time there), then you’ll probably feel a lot more comfortable with it since it works pretty much the same way as it does in those other engines.

Some of the defaults are a little nicer - there’s a bit of roughness in the specular to start with, and you don’t have to know to switch the BSDF to GGX for metals and high gloss mats because it’s GGX-like right out of the box. The weight slider system in the Standard Surface material also makes more intuitive sense to artists than the color/float system for the amount of contribution a layer/channel has to the material.

The way Subsurface Scattering is implemented is interesting as well. Standard Surface has a built-in scattering which means less setup with external medium nodes. It’s also possible to mix Diffuse and Specular type transmissions in the same material, where you’d need to use a Mix or Composite Material to do this otherwise.

The layer naming is more in keeping with PBR material sets, so it’s more intuitive where to plug textures in from these sets.

Thin Film affects transmission, which it doesn’t in other Octane materials.

Why Shouldn’t You Use It?

The Universal Material is older and more battle-tested, so it’ll probably be a little more stable in a wider variety of cases for now.

Important:  If you’re using the Mac version of Octane, Rotation and Extra Roughness are currently not working in the Standard Surface material (they do work in the Universal Material), so it may be good to wait a dot release or two to use it while these get resolved. Everything is functional on Windows.

The Universal Material is a little more versatile, especially in C4D. You can pick different BSDF models and Scattering mediums (as of this writing you can actually do this in Standalone, but you can’t in the C4D plugin). There are also other small things like the ability to specify real-world metal properties (Metallic IOR) that aren’t present in Standard Surface.

If you’re using C4D and you want to do anything more advanced in the Standard Surface material than simply move sliders around (like adding textures into a channel for instance), you must use the node editor. There are no fields in the material to add shaders in the C4D UI like there are in other Octane materials.

Finally - and not inconsequentially - if you’re already familiar with the Universal Material and are primarily an Octane user, the Standard Surface material doesn’t really offer a ton of advantages. It’d be some learning and re-thinking of your workflow to fully adopt it and probably not speed you up too much (if at all).
 

Part II

Standard Surface Material Overview

Accessing the Material

Like all other Octane materials, the Standard Surface material is found in the Materials menu in the Live Viewer.

Important:  Unlike the Diffuse, Glossy, Specular, Metallic, Toon, or Universal materials, we can not automatically convert between the Standard Surface and other material types. The other materials mentioned all share a similar structure, where the Standard Surface is a bit different, so it doesn’t easily shift.

Using the node editor, we can still copy all the nodes fed into a Universal or Glossy or whatever material and paste them into a new Standard Surface and hook them up to the appropriate channels, but this process is manual.

Layers/Channels

All materials in Octane (and most render engines) are broken down into buckets that each control a different aspect of the material. Most material types in Octane call these buckets “channels”, but the Standard Surface material calls them “layers” to keep with the naming of the original Autodesk material. It’s the same concept, just called something different.

Layer Contribution / Weight Slider

This is one of those places where the Standard Surface breaks away from the rest of the Octane materials. The Standard Surface material has a straightforward weight slider in each channel that determines how much the whole channel is contributing to the material.

Move the weight slider to the left toward 0, we get less of that channel’s contribution to the overall look of the material, move it to the right toward 1, we get more of it.

This is very different from the other Octane material types that use a more complex method that involves a combination of the color/float/texture fields with a very specific hierarchy. The weight system is likely a lot easier for beginners to pick up.

Important:  The weight slider is linear. This is a whole involved topic, but for now we just need to know that this means the results will look different if we’re adjusting the weight slider vs making the material color darker (as we can see above). It’s a good idea to set the weight slider to 1 for most layers where color values are involved (like the base layer) and then just use the color controls to darken it.

Layer Stacking and Mixing

Like all other materials, the different layers are stacked in a very specific way. A higher layer in the stack either overrides or adds to the ones lower in the stack.

Autodesk provides a helpful diagram of how all the layers fit together.

A black void is at the very bottom of the stack. If all the layers have no contribution, then we’ll only see a matte black silhouette of our geometry that’s unaffected by lighting.
 

• Diffuse reflection (Base layer color or texture in the material) sits at the lowest level right on top of that black void.
• Diffuse transmission/Subsurface scattering (called “Subsurface” in the material) completely overrides the Diffuse properties.
• Sheen then sits on top of Base/Subsurface and adds to the ones below, allowing for satin-looking diffuse/subsurface materials.
• The specular Transmission layer (refraction like in glass) completely overrides everything under it, including sheen. It’s possible to get a sheen on top of specular Transmission, but it has to be done via material layers, not the Sheen channel.
• Specular reflection (Specular layer in the material) then sits on top of everything and adds to them, so we can have glossy glass or glossy plastic.
• Specular reflection - metal (found in the Base layer in the material and called “metalness”) mostly overrides everything under it. We’ll look at this in more detail later.
• Thin film adds to the reflection (either specular or metallic) AND the refraction (transmission). It’s not on this chart, but it’s in the material.
• Emission adds to everything under it. It’s always a good idea to kill the contribution of all the other channels if we’re making an emissive material so we don’t get any weird artifacts caused by other layers bleeding through.
• Specular reflection - coating (just Coating in the material) sits on top of the stack and adds to everything under it, allowing us to have a glossy emissive material if we want.
• Material layers can then add to or override everything under them.
• Transparency (Opacity in the material) is closer to a post effect where it’s just making everything more or less transparent, regardless of the other material properties.

Nodes

The node system is always the preferred method of constructing materials in Octane. Some plugins like C4D also allow us to edit materials using a Material Editor, but it’s often more tedious for anything more complex than a super simple material.

Important:  As of this writing (2025.1.2), the Material Manager in C4D does not allow us to attach external nodes to the Standard Surface Material. External textures will appear in the Material Manager AFTER we hook a node up in the node editor, but they will then disappear if they are disconnected. We need to use the node editor to do anything more complex than just messing around with the internal controls in each layer.

Also Important:  When adding a texture to the Base layer, we need to remember that the Weight slider STAYS AT 0.8 (its default value) even after we attach a texture. This means the texture will look darker and a little dingier than expected unless we move the weight slider to 1 again.

Part III

Standard Surface Layers

Base Layer

Coming from other Octane material types, this is a little different. 

The Base layer (channel) in the Standard Surface material primarily controls what we’d normally think of as the Diffuse or Albedo color. It also has Metalness (Metallic in the Universal/Metallic material) lumped in. The color controls affect both diffuse and metallic surfaces, similar to Artistic IOR mode in the Universal Material.

Just like all the other channels, it has a Weight slider that controls the contribution of the entire channel - both the Diffuse and Metalness. This slider is linear, so the difference between 0 and 0.1 is visually far larger than the difference between 0.9 and 1. It makes sense from a compositing standpoint though, so we just need to deal with that weirdness :)

Important: The default weight for this channel is 0.8. If we’re trying to match specific brand colors, we need to make sure we crank the weight slider up to 1 (full contribution) , otherwise it’ll shift the colors just enough to be annoying as we can see in the illustration above. This is also true for when we attach textures to this layer.

The BRDF and Diffuse roughness controls are only for the Diffuse portion of the channel - they don’t impact the Metalness property. To get roughness on a metal material, we need to bounce over to the Specular layer after setting the Metalness in the Base layer.

BRDF

Important: Unlike the Universal material which allows us to control both BRDF for diffuse and BSDF for specular, the Standard Surface material only allows us to change BRDF - BSDF is hardcoded to the STD model, which is similar to GGX.

At Diffuse Roughness = 0, all three BRDF models look pretty much the same. 

The Lambertian BRDF model is quick and dirty, and not super realistic. It’s not affected by roughness. Odds are good we’ll never need this, especially considering that the other two models look about the same as it when the roughness is turned down to 0.

The other two models are more advanced and realistic. The Oren-Nayar model looks more flat and clay-like as the roughness goes up, while the Octane model looks more satiny. Oren-Nayar is the default mode and probably good for 90+% of the materials we’re going to make, but if we want something super satiny, Octane is a good choice.

Specular Layer

This layer has a lot packed in - let’s break it down

Weight and Color

Similar to other Octane materials, the Specular channel controls specular reflections. The way Standard Surface handles this is a little different though. 

In the Standard Surface material, the Weight slider controls the overall contribution of the channel. This is a linear scale similar to the Float slider in the other materials. Where it differs is how it handles the color.

In the other materials, the specular color determines the weight as well - if we want our reflections a bit darker, we have to push the color more toward black because the color controls override the float control. In the Standard Surface material, the color and weight are two different controls. We can pick a bright, fully saturated color like #FF00FF and then take the weight slider down and it’ll darken the reflections. This is something that can’t be done in other Octane materials - we’d have to pick a darker magenta instead.

We can still also set the reflection intensity using the color if we want, as we see above: One of the shaderballs is set to a white specular color with the weight at 0.5, and the one next to it has the weight at 1, but the color at 0.5 (float texture piped into the color pin set to 0.5). The results are identical.

Roughness (Specular)

The roughness slider in the Specular layer controls how rough both specular and metallic reflections are. What’s interesting here is that other material types don’t have separate Diffuse and Specular roughness controls like Standard Surface does - the Roughness channel affects both equally in the Universal material.

IOR (Specular)

IOR (stands for Index of Refraction, and is sometimes just called Index) affects both the Specular and Transmission channels. In the Specular channel, it makes the material more glossy. Realistic values usually go up to 3 or 4 - anything past that, it’s better to crank the metalness if we’re after realism.

We’ll look at how it affects the Transmission channel in the Transmission section.

Specular Color in Metals

Unlike other Octane materials, Metalness does not completely override the specular properties. 

When we change the Specular color on a material where the Metalness is at 1, it has a similar effect to changing the Edge Tinting on a Universal material where it colors the glancing reflections off the edges of the material. 

When we go from white to black, the difference is there, but it’s super subtle - the metal just looks a bit more contrasty overall around the edges. When we change it to a non-gray color, it becomes a lot more obvious like the magenta in the illustration above.

Important: The darker the Base layer color is, or the less contribution the Base layer channel has using the weight slider, the more apparent the specular edge color will be, and vice-versa.

A good workflow here is to set the specular color to white at first when creating metals, and then start adjusting it as needed to make the metal more contrasty or to give it a color sheen.
 

Anisotropy

Similar to the Universal Material, Anisotropy requires these things:

1. A BSDF that supports it. Fortunately we don’t have to worry about that with the Standard Surface material because we don’t have a choice - it’s STD and it supports it. Cool.
2. Specular Reflection - Either Metallic or just Specular works. The effect is a lot more apparent with higher IORs if we’re using Specular.
3. Specular Roughness - Anisotropy will not work without it, and the higher it is, the stronger the effect. The Standard Surface material defaults to 0.2 which is pretty weak as we can see above, so moving this to 1 is a good idea at first, and then we can dial it back as needed.
4. Anisotropy slider - Set it to 1 to start, or -1 if the inverse effect is desired, then dial it back if it’s too strong.
5. Rotation - This can either be a numerical value (which does different things on different surfaces, or a texture for something like brushed metal.

Anisotropic textures should be grayscale, ideally generated by an app that puts out linear texture maps. The texture usually goes into the Rotation input, but we can also feed it into the Roughness input or even the Anisotropy input to get different looks.

Important:  The Rotation input is currently (as of 2025.2.1) not working on the Mac version of Standalone or the C4D plugin.

Transmission Layer

This controls the properties of light that can pass through the material. This layer is closely tied with the Specular layer. Thin Wall transmission is located in Geometric Properties - we’ll look at that later.

Transmission weight

Transmission weight controls the overall contribution the Transmission Layer has on the material. It’s usually more realistic and accurate to either set it to either 0 or 1 and find other ways to obscure the light, but sometimes it’s just easier to make it semi transmissive and call it a day.

Roughness (Located in Specular)

Roughness for BOTH the Specular and Transmission properties is located in the Specular layer. True to its name, it roughens reflections and refractions.

Extra Roughness (Located in Transmission)

Extra roughness ONLY affects the roughness in the transmission layer of the object (it probably should be called “transmission roughness” instead of “extra”, but y’know, standards and such…). In the above example, “Spec. Rough.” refers to the Roughness control in the Specular layer, and “Extra Rough.” refers to the Extra roughness control in the Transmission layer. 

If we only use Extra roughness, the specular reflections stay sharp while the refraction roughens. If we only use Specular roughness, the reflections AND refractions roughen. If we crank both Specular roughness and Extra roughness to 1, it looks the same as just putting Specular roughness to 1, so nothing “extra” there.

The interesting part about Extra Roughness is that we can set it to negative values. This counters the effects of roughness in the Transmission, making it so we can subtract roughness from just the Transmission.

Another (and probably easier) option for all this if we want independent control over the reflection and refraction is to turn off the Specular layer (weight=0) and use the Coating layer (or a Specular Material layer) instead which has its own IOR and roughness controls. Then we can use either Roughness OR Extra Roughness to control the refraction roughness and the Coating layer’s roughness to independently control the specular reflections.

Important:  As of this writing (Octane 2025.1.2), Extra Roughness is not working in the Mac build (works fine in Windows). This will hopefully be resolved soon. The method listed above (Coating layer) still works fine though.

IOR (Located in Specular)

Located in the Specular Layer, IOR controls refraction in the Transmission layer as well as the Specular reflection. If we’d rather have separate controls for the IOR of both, we can take the Specular Layer’s weight to 0 (IOR will still affect Transmission), and then use a Coating layer to handle specular reflections.

Dispersion

Dispersion splits light into component wavelengths (colors) in Transmissive materials, giving that fun rainbowy effect. Standard Surface uses an Abbe number rather than the Cauchy formula by default, but we can choose either. The Abbe number is generally easier to work with and find values for online (type “Abbe number for Diamond” into Google with the AI on). 

0 means no dispersion, and then the scale kind of goes the opposite way we’d expect. 1 gives us the most dispersion, and 100 gives us the least. We tend to find that most real world values are in the 40-70 range for common materials like glass and gemstones. For artistic purposes, we’ll probably want to be in the 5-10 range to get the most bang for our buck out of the effect.

Specific controls

There are a few advanced controls that are located elsewhere in other Octane materials that are worth calling out here. Affect alpha (used when exporting PNGs or other transparent image formats), Fake shadows (for architectural glass), and Allow caustics (for when we are using the Photon tracing engine) all live in the Transmission layer in the Standard Surface material.

Scattering

Scattering is one of the most stupidly complex things we can do in a render engine, and it takes a while to get your head around it. There’s too much to go into for this guide, so we’re just going to touch on the basics here. For an in-depth look at how SSS works in Octane, check out the Subsurface Scattering Deep Dive guide (for Standard Surface, skip the Absorption and Scattering mediums and go straight to Random Walk since that’s the algo used here).

Scattering in general works a little differently in the Standard Surface Material than it does in other Octane materials. In the Standard Surface material, there are two places where we control scattering: Some of it is in the Transmission Layer and some is in the Subsurface Layer.

Important: The Subsurface layer in the Standard Surface material overrides the Base Layer and Specular Layer, but is overridden by the Transmission Layer. This is a very different way of thinking about SSS if we’ve been using Octane for a while. If we’re just starting out with this material type, we should think about whether to use Subsurface scattering (opaque plastics, skin, organics, etc.) or Transmission Scattering (mostly cloudy liquids or glass)

Finally, for long-term Octane users, Octane Standalone gives us the ability to override the built-in Random Walk medium in the material, but this hasn’t been implemented in the C4D plugin as of this writing (August 2025). Hopefully soon :)

Scattering in the Transmission Layer

The Depth, Scatter, and Scatter Anisotropy controls in the Transmission Layer are what we’d use for things like cloudy glass and liquids. This is similar to using Specular-type Transmission in the Universal material. 

Important: IOR has a large impact on the look of this type of scattering. If we’re just not getting results we want, we may want to make sure we have the IOR (in the Specular layer) set appropriately for the material we’re trying to create. Water, for example is 1.3, but Standard Surface defaults to 1.5 (glass).

Transmission: Scattering Color

The transmission color and the scatter color work hand-in-hand to give us the overall color. These colors not only tint the object, but also affect how the light bounces around. A small nudge of the HSV Value slider (darkening the color) can make something look more or less dense, even if the color is the same.

Why doesn’t scattering appear to do anything when Transmission is at white? Why are we getting green when we combine red transmission and orange scattering? These are excellent questions - the Subsurface Scattering Deep Dive guide explains it in the hundreds or thousands of words that we don’t have here.

Transmission: Scattering Depth

The Depth value controls how far into the model the light travels before scattering. 0 is off (no depth = no scattering). At very small values like 0.01, light scatters immediately upon entering the model causing a dense look as the rays bounce around close to the surface. At high values like 1, light passes through most of the model before scattering. The higher the value, the higher chance of passing all the way through the model without scattering at all which is why it looks less dense, especially around thin parts (ears and trunk above).

Transmission: Scatter Anisotropy

Scatter Anisotropy is a subtle “finishing touch” effect that influences which direction the rays go when they scatter. Negative values favor redirecting the rays back the way they came. Positive values favor continuing the rays in the same direction they were going. The default value of 0 scatters the rays in all directions equally and is usually the best choice unless we need to tweak the effect.

Scattering in the Subsurface Layer

The Subsurface layer in the Standard Surface material is used for translucent plastics (ABS/PETG), organics like skin or food, or other materials that aren’t glossy but still transmit light. This is similar to Diffuse Transmission in other Octane materials (when using a Random Walk medium).

Important: Unlike scattering in the Transmission layer, IOR has no impact on Subsurface scattering, 

Subsurface Weight

This controls the overall contribution of the Subsurface channel to the material. It overrides the Diffuse channel, but is overridden by the Transmission channel. 

When working with Subsurface (especially when just getting started), it’s usually a good idea to set this slider to 1 to get the most out of the effect. Changing it to a partial weight will muddy it up with the Diffuse color.

It’s also a good idea to change the Weight of the Specular layer to 0 at first to see how light interacts with the SSS, and then add it back in if we need the surface to be glossy as well.

Subsurface Scale

Even though it’s way down on the list in the material, we’re going to look at it first here because it has such a massive impact on the effect. If things just don’t look right, this is the first place to check.

Scale in the Standard Surface material is similar to the Density property in other Octane mediums, only the lower the Scale value, the more dense the material will feel, and vice-versa.

Important:  In Cinema 4D, the slider for this control goes from 0-1. Depending on the size of our model, sometimes with a larger model we may need to crank it much higher (5, 10, etc.) to get a certain result. Since the slider maxes at 1, we’ll need to manually enter higher values in the field. If we’re working in real world scale, the opposite holds true and we have to bring it down really low to see results, like 0.01 or 0.05.

The physical size of the model plays a large role in the look - the larger the object, there more stuff there is inside it for light to bang around and react to, so the less of an effect we’ll get with the same material and lighting conditions when compared to a smaller object (as we can see in the illustration above). We’ll either need to adjust the size of our object or change properties in the material to compensate, so a good rule of thumb is always work in real-world scale

A full breakdown of how density works is in the upfront section of the Subsurface Scattering Deep Dive guide. 

Subsurface Color and Radius

Getting a nice look with Subsurface requires a balance between the Subsurface Color and Subsurface Radius controls (after getting the scale right). How exactly that works is a little complicated and is fully explored in the Random Walk section of the Subsurface Scattering Deep Dive guide.

For now, here’s what we need to know:

The Subsurface Color controls the overall color of the scattering in the model.

The Radius, if grayscale, controls how far into the model the light travels before absorbing and scattering: White goes all the way in and the look is more translucent like in panel 2 above, black scatters immediately and the the look is more opaque like panel 4 above.

If the radius is colored, the Value (the “V” in HSV) does the same thing as the grayscale value above, but the Hue and Saturation further mess with the absorption color and change the overall appearance as the light travels inward.

If we’re having trouble getting the look we want, adjusting the Value for the color on the Radius is a good place to start getting visible results, and of course altering the scale will have a large impact as well.

Subsurface Anisotropy

Similar to Anisotropy in Transmission, this is a very subtle effect that changes the odds of rays scattering back toward the light source (-1) instead of keeping on in the direction they were going (+1). Usually this is best left at 0 for a reusable material, and then adjusted per model if there’s a tricky lighting situation.

Coating Layer

The Coating layer is basically another Specular layer that sits on top of everything else. It’s good for adding gloss to a material that uses Emission or Metallic properties (which override the Specular layer), or if we want our refractive IOR or roughness in a glass to be different than the reflective IOR. Coating has its own controls for roughness, anisotropy, bump, and normal that work the same way the regular versions of those controls work.

Important:  The Rotation control for Anisotropy in this layer does not currently work in the Mac version of Octane.

Sheen Layer

The Sheen channel produces a satin-type finish over the top of the Diffuse and Subsurface layers. It works best with a matte type material like cloth or paper.

The sheen Roughness slider affects how spread out the effect is. 0 will produce a sharp rim light effect, while 1 will create almost a rough metal look. Usually starting around 0.25-0.4 works best.

Emission layer

This one is kind of weird coming from other Octane materials, and it can really throw us if we don’t understand what’s happening. 

In the Standard Surface material, there is a 0-1 Weight slider like the rest of the layers, but in this case it applies an internal texture emission node with a power of 1 and surface brightness on. This will emit some light, but it’s a pretty weak effect because it can’t go above 1.

Important:  Emission is additive in the Standard Surface material - this means it will add to the layers under it, and even when it’s set to 1, it won’t fully override everything else, leading to some really bizarre and unexpected results. It’s a good idea to set all other channel contributions to 0 when working on an emissive material and only bring them back after we’re happy with the emission itself.

If we need it brighter, or want to use the Kelvin scale, we have to put an additional external emission node into the Emission field. This can either be a Blackbody or Texture emission node with all the controls we’re used to there.

Important:  This internal emission node is MULTIPLIED by the external Blackbody or Texture Emission node we feed into the Emission pin. If the Weight slider is at 0, or if the built-in Emission color is black, there will be no visible emission even if our external emission node is cranked up to a million (fun fact - it actually goes to a million, and there probably is no reason to ever do that).

The internal Emission controls also allow us to change the color. This too will multiply the color of the external emission node, which is really hard to predict, so best practice is to leave the internal control pure white and the weight set to 1, and use the external control to change the power and color.

Important: The Emission layer only partially overrides the Base, Specular, Transmission, and Subsurface layers. It’s always best to turn off the contribution of all these layers if we’re making an emissive material otherwise it might get murky and we’ll get weird artifacts.

For a full rundown of Emission in Octane, check out the Lighting and Emission guide.

Thin Film Layer

The Thin Film Layer channel puts an iridescent oily sheen on the object. 

Coming from the Universal Material, thin film works about the same, but the scale is WAY different. The Film Thickness in the Universal mat (called Float) is a 0-1 scale where we start seeing interesting results around .1 or so. In the Standard Surface, it’s a 0-2000 scale where we start seeing results around 100 or so. Film IOR is the same in both.

The more reflective (higher IOR) the material, the more obvious the effect. Because of this, it works exceptionally well with metallic materials.

In the case of a glossy opaque material, the Specular channel with a low IOR (1.3) gives a weak Thin Film effect. While the IOR could be punched up to 2 or 3 to enhance the effect, it would also change the other specular properties of the reflections. Adding a Coating layer with an IOR between 2 and 3 makes it really punchy and allows us to control the effect separately from the specular channel. Coating also helps a lot with thin wall transmission as we’ll see for making things like soap bubbles.

Unlike the Universal Material, Thin Film actually does affect Transmission in the Standard Surface material, so that’s cool. 

The coloring of this effect is a little hard to art direct, but what it essentially comes down to is playing with both the channel's Film IOR and Float sliders (leave the color input at 0,0,0).

Film Thickness cycles through the colors. Anything below 50 is very difficult to see, especially at a film IOR greater than 1. 50-600 is the sweet spot, and the colors start to munge together too much above that.

Film IOR controls how spread out the colors are, with 1 having a tight radial pattern toward the edges of the geometry and higher than that showing fewer of the colors in the spectrum.

Typically the rounder the object, or more the points on the surface vary in the geometry, the more colorful this effect will be.

Geometric Properties

This is sort of a catch-all location for a handful of options. Bump, Normal, and Displacement all live here, as well as Thin Wall (located in Transmission in the Universal Material), and Opacity and Round Edges (located in their own channels in the Universal Material).

Both displacement and round edges in this section require special nodes in order to use those properties. Displacement uses a displacement node that allows us to choose either Vertex or Texture displacement. A texture then needs to be plugged into that to drive the height.

Round edges just requires a Round edges node where all the adjustments are made.

Bump, Normal & Displacement

Bump, normal, and Displacement are all located in the Geometric Properties layer, which kind of makes sense. These are fairly complex topics, so there’s a separate guide on Bump and Normal, and a series of guides on Displacement. Except for the location of the controls in the material itself, they all work exactly the same as the Universal material.

Quick summary: 

Bump mapping is a quick and dirty way to break up the surface. It works by using a grayscale texture to cheat the model’s surface normals. It falls apart when viewed up close, especially around the edges of the model because it doesn’t affect the actual geometry.

Normal mapping is similar to bump, but more advanced in that it uses an RGB image to more precisely cheat the normals. The tradeoff is that building normal maps is harder than bump maps. It also does not affect the actual geometry, so it can fall flat if we get too close or look at the edges of the geo too closely.

Displacement uses the same grayscale image bump does, but actually does affect the geometry. It looks a lot better (even close up or on the edges), but takes more effort to set up, has a laundry list of pitfalls and gotchas, and needs longer to render.

Round edges

This appears to round sharp edges of the geometry at render time without affecting the geometry of the model.

It’s similar to a bump or normal map where it doesn’t alter the silhouette of the object though, so it’s best for geometry that just has some sharp internal corners, or small bevels that catch specular highlights.

Fast mode is good for adding just a touch of bevel to sharp edges to bring out highlights - this mode is capped at 1cm, and does not work with the roundness and samples controls.

Accurate mode works with larger values and utilizes the advanced controls like roundness and samples which further refine the look of the effect. It may take a touch longer to render, but usually it’s super fast on modern GPUs.

Concave and Convex are the same as Accurate, but only affect edges that are either concave (less than a 180 degree angle where connected) or convex (greater than a 180 degree angle where connected).

Consider others takes intersecting geometry into account.

Thin wall

Turning this on causes Octane to ignore the volume of the model. This only affects materials with Transmission or Subsurface contribution.

When used in combination with Transmission, IOR and scattering are ignored. This creates a material well suited for super thin transparent objects like blown glass ornaments or soap bubbles (thin wall + thin film + coating does a nice job with this as seen above). This is similar to the Thin Wall Specular transmission type in other Octane materials.

Important:  Since IOR and Scattering is ignored, the entire material will be invisible unless we either have Specular or Coating reflections.

When used with Subsurface, the Scale and Radius are ignored. This type of material becomes suited for leaves, parchment, and other very thin translucent (but not transparent) objects. This is similar to the Thin Wall Diffuse transmission type in other Octane materials.
 

Smooth and Smooth Shadow Terminator

Both of these affect low polygon objects.

Smooth (on by default) follows the Phong angle and smooths out low poly geometry. If we reduce the model’s Phong angle to 0 (in the Phong tag in C4D or elsewhere in other DCCs), it gives us a faceted look based on the actual geometry (quads in the example above). 

Octane triangulates all geometry before rendering, so If we turn off Smooth in the Geometry Properties of the material, regardless of the Phong angle, it gives a triangular faceted look instead of a quad one.

Smooth Shadow Terminator also affects low poly geometry, but it’s far more subtle. This has to do with smoothing the shadows out as they cross polygons. It’s off by default because it can cause other render errors on higher poly models, but turning it on for certain models may help resolve some steppy shadow situations.

Opacity

The Opacity Channel works similarly to the Opacity slider in Photoshop. This is very different from Transmission and isn’t used to create glass or translucent materials.

The 0-1 float slider adjusts the opacity of the entire object. This is good for a hologram or a fade transition. Unlike Photoshop, we start seeing the back side of the object through the front side as we reduce the opacity, so there are some interesting effects that can happen here.

Important: As of this writing (2025.2.1), there’s a bug where the Opacity value defaults to 0, but the actual opacity is 1. If we shift the slider to any value and shift it back, the actual opacity will go back to 0 and the object will be invisible.

If we run a texture into the opacity channel, we can punch holes in materials meant for thin objects like paper, fabric, or a decal. This isn’t great for 3D geometry unless the walls are supposed to be super thin like paper or something.

When a texture is used in the Opacity channel, black pixels in the texture become 100% transparent in the material, and white pixels become 100% opaque. Grays fall between, making semi transparent portions of the object.

Material Layer

This works exactly the same as it does in the Universal material. This is more of an advanced topic that’s covered in depth in the Material Mixing and Layering guide.

Part IV

Quick Workflows

PBR Texture Sets in C4D

Both the Universal material and the Standard Surface material are good at using pre-made PBR (Physically-based Rendering) texture sets like those found on 3dassets.one. As long as the files themselves are named properly, Octane for C4D (and possibly other Octane plugins) have a mostly automatic way of hooking these up to the correct ports.

This is just a quick how-to - a full rundown of the process can be found in the Texture Set guide

1. Download a texture set
2. Create a new material (Standard Surface in this case, but this works with other types)
3. Open the material in the node editor
4. Select all the textures in the set from the Finder or Explorer window and drag them on to the material in the node editor.
5. Important: Set the Base layer weight to 1 or the material will be darker than expected.
6. Tweaktweaktweaktweaktweak
    

Things to know

This gets us most of the way there, but unless the texture set is super basic, we’re going to have to finish hooking up nodes manually.

Even if only one texture in a folder is dragged in, Octane will look for others with a similar naming convention and bring them in as well.

Octane will ignore anything that isn’t a valid texture or is not named correctly - it just won’t even try to import it.

Octane only uses GL-type Normal Maps - if the texture set has a DX-type, it will be ignored. If it only has a DX-type, then we need to bring it in manually and invert the green channel (process is found in the Texture Set guide, search for “invert”)

Advanced setups using AO or SSS need to be done manually

The height map only goes into a Displacement node - if we need it for bump instead or in addition to Displacement, we need to hook that up manually.
 

Redshift Material Conversion in C4D

Since Redshift and Octane both use the Universal Material, it’s now possible to convert Redshift materials to Octane Standard Surface materials with varying levels of success.

1. Load a Redshift material into the scene
2. Select the material in the Material Manager
3. In the Live Viewer, go to Materials > Convert Materials
4. Fix it
   :)

Things to know

Keep expectations LOW - this is a simple conversion process, not some fancy AI tech that understands what all the Redshift nodes do and converts them to appropriate Octane ones. In fact, it has the tendency to make a mess out of the node editor when trying to convert Redshift nodes which end up cluttering up the node editor and not doing anything.

This won’t work with Redshift materials that use Substance (SBSAR) materials. The Substance needs to be exported as standard PBR textures before Octane can handle this.

Important: Always check the Color space. Often times pre-built materials will have incorrect color spaces, especially for normal maps (they should be linear, or non-color data, not sRGB)

Wrap Up

If you got through this guide, you should have a good basic understanding of the Standard Surface material and how it differs from the other material types in Octane. There is a similar guide on the Universal Material if you’d like to compare.

On a personal note, this is guide #050! There’s a nice symmetry in this one being a similar type of guide as #001 (The Universal Material channels deep dive).

I wouldn’t have guessed when writing the first iteration of that first guide that it would lead to this, but I’m very happy with all the progress made and impact this project has had on my understanding of Octane. I’m very glad you all came along on the ride with me.

Here’s to 050 more :D