UI Series
Version 3.0, Updated Jan 2026 using Octane 2026.1 and Cinema 4D 2026.1
~6,400 words, average read time: 25 min
About this guide
This guide walks through how to set up, save, and reset custom defaults in different areas of both Octane and Cinema 4D.
Changes from 2.0: Now covers the new C4D 2026 ACES-as-default debacle and other new info learned over time
Downloads
Default files and layouts created using this guide can be 💾 found here
This guide is also available in 📄 PDF format here
Intro
This guide is all about setting up custom defaults so that every time we open a brand new file, we can very quickly dive in and get to work without having to do the same menial tasks each time.
In the Cinema 4D plugin for Octane, there are three different preset areas to know about and get set up properly, and they should be done in a particular order. This can get a little confusing, so let’s take a look at how it all works.
1. Octane per-project settings
When we click the gear icon in the Live Viewer, it pops up a window that has a number of tabs with a bunch of Octane-related settings.
Most of these settings are saved in, and travel with each .c4d file, making them per-project settings that only live in this particular C4D file. For example, if we set the kernel to Photon Tracing, make the max samples 1024, turn on ACES tone mapping, apply bloom, and then save the file and give it to someone else, they’ll see all these settings when they open the C4D file and click the gear icon in the Live Viewer.
Multiple sets of these per-project settings can be stored as Octane presets using a management tool. If we activate an Octane preset, it overwrites all the per-project settings with the values stored in it. Those become our new per-project settings which we can further tweak.
The actual file on the drive where these saved Octane presets are stored is called presets.dat and can be found by going into C4D’s preferences (Edit>Preferences), clicking the “Open Preferences Folder” button at the bottom, and then going into the \prefs folder.
2. Octane global settings
There are also global Octane settings that don’t change from project to project. These are settings like the node colors, account settings, file paths, out of core RAM limits, and other things we generally don’t want to tweak too much unless we’re running into problems. They are found in the Octane Settings under the Settings tab.
Global settings live in a file called oct.dat which is also located in the \prefs folder.
Important: There is no easy way to reset the global Octane settings. They do not reset with the “Reset” command. To get the defaults back, we have to shut down C4D (otherwise this won’t work), go in the path above, delete the oct.dat file, and then re-launch C4D. This will not affect our saved Octane presets (different file).
3. C4D settings
Cinema 4D itself also has per-project settings located in Project Settings (Ctl/Cmd-D), Render Settings (Ctl/Cmd-B), and Viewport settings (Shift-V). These settings also get saved in and travel with the .c4d file.
We can set up a Startup Scene which contains all of both the Octane and C4D per-project settings and loads every time we make a new file as kind of a template. This can be set in the C4D Preferences (Edit>Preferences) under the Files section.
C4D also has layouts which control where windows are located and docked, and which tools are in the UI. Layouts are managed in the upper right of the C4D UI and are global (do not travel with C4D files).
In this guide, we’re going to go over all of this and set up some good defaults to make our lives easier.
4. Bonus: Overwrite (Override) Kernel Settings
Important: This is a more advanced technique and not necessary for simple projects. If you’re new to Octane, don’t worry about this for now, just know that it’s available later down the line if you need it.
If we go into C4D’s Render Settings (Ctl/Cmd-B), choose OctaneRenderer in the Renderer dropdown, then go to the Overwrite kernel settings tab and check “Enable”, it will show us all the kernel settings. We can alter them here and they will save with the active C4D render settings in the lower left portion of the UI.
This means we can have three or four different sets of settings we can bounce between for a particular project (say “draft”, “high quality”, “portrait”, “landscape”, etc.).
This is a temporary set of Octane kernel settings that overrides (does not overwrite) the values in the Octane Settings area. They’re only active as long as the C4D render setting is active.
Important: The defaults for these values aren’t exactly the same as the Octane Settings defaults (notably Scatter depth, max overlap volumes, and nested dialectrics) - be sure to check all the values before rendering.
Part I
Custom C4D Layout
Above, we can see the default layout. It’s pretty good for stock C4D, but can be made quite a bit better for us Octaners. There are several other layouts at the top set up for things like modeling or UVs, and a little three dot menu at the end that lets us create custom layouts and define one as the Startup Layout. In the first part of this guide, we’re going to build a custom layout for Octane and set it as our Startup Layout.
Important: Layouts are per-install, not per-project. They don’t travel with .c4d files.
Docking the Live Viewer
We’re going to be using the Live Viewer a lot, so it makes sense to dock it in the interface. This is done by first opening it (Octane menu > Live Viewer Window), then grabbing the LV window by the hamburger menu (stacked lines in the upper left corner), and dragging it until a light gray preview bar appears where the window can dock. When we let go, it snaps it into place.
This is going to be largely dependent on the type of scene we’re working on and the aspect ratio of our screens. If we have a single 1x1 or 16x9 panel, docking it to the left or right of the Perspective viewport is usually pretty good for a versatile half render/half viewport type of layout. We’re going to do that in this guide.
If we’re working on a wide cinematic aspect ratio scene, placing it above or below the perspective viewport can be a good strategy. If we have a slower GPU, or only need to see a small render view, the upper right corner above the object manager can be a good place to stash it.
When we launch C4D, this placement will load in with our Startup layout, so it’s best to set it up the way we’d be using it most of the time. We can make multiple layouts if we have a few very different but common use cases.
Customizing the Palettes
Next up is adding custom UI buttons, and replacing some of the stock ones in the layout.
Important: The Material Drawer can’t be opened or closed in Customization mode, so we need to make sure it’s open prior to customizing. That’s the little shaderball icon next to the render clapboard icons.
Let’s go under the Window menu under Customization, and choose Customize Palettes. This will put the interface into Customization Mode (light gray boxes will appear around everything we can customize), and will also pop up the Command Manager.
Most of the Octane-related commands can be found by typing “Octane” into the Name filter. One notable exception is the HDRI Environment, which needs to be searched for separately by typing “HDRI”.
To add a command/button to the interface, we can just drag it from the command manager into the palette we want it in. To remove a button from the interface, we can double-click it.
In this guide, we’re going to add: Octane Daylight Rig, HDRI Environment, Texture Environment, Octane Camera, Targeted Area Light, Octane Object Tag, Octane Rest Position Tag. Feel free to add anything else you find yourself using a lot (Scatter, IES light, etc.)
To clean this bar up, we can also remove all of the Standard and Redshift camera, light, and sky objects that are already in the interface by double-clicking them while in Customization Mode.
In the Material Drawer, let’s drop in the Universal Material and Standard Surface Material commands next to the eyedropper so new materials can be made quickly.
When we’re finished, we can just close the Command Manager, and it will get us out of customization mode.
Resizing & Saving the Layout
Layouts save the sizing & location of all the UI panels and viewports, so let’s shift them around until it seems about right depending on the size and aspect ratio of our monitors. We also need to decide if we want to start with the material drawer open or closed whenever we open C4D or select our custom layout.
When we’re happy with the proportions and UI elements in our layout, we can go to Window>Customization>Save Layout as... and save it in the default location. If we need to reinstall C4D, this is the directory where we’d drop in our custom layouts if you built them previously and saved them elsewhere. It will then appear to the far right in our layout bar in the upper right of the C4D interface.
We can make this layout the default when we launch C4D by going to Window>Customization>Save as Startup Layout.
Each custom layout is saved as two files - an .l4d and a .prf. We can get to those files by going to C4D’s Edit menu > Preferences > Open Preferences Folder and going into the C4D folder > library > layout.
The layout built during the creation of this guide which works well on a MacBook Pro screen can be found here .
Part II
Custom Octane Presets
Overview
Having a good set of Octane Settings presets for various project types will help the iteration speed of our renders quite a bit. All of Octane’s preset management is located in the Presets menu of the Octane settings (gear button on the Live Viewer).
When a preset is loaded (selected from the Presets menu), it does a one-time overwrite of the current per-project Octane settings. If a setting is altered after the preset is loaded (say, Max Samples is doubled or something), that setting will be wiped out and replaced by the value in the preset if we load our preset again.
Octane presets save ALMOST EVERYTHING in the Octane settings window. There are some global settings in the Settings tab that we’ll explore later, but everything else can be saved in a preset.
In this section, we’re going to create a preset called LookDev 2026 (development of the look of a render). In many cases, this is all that’ll be needed - a good foundation of settings that can be further altered per project, but we can make as many of these presets as we want for various applications if we work better that way.
Kernels Tab
A deep dive guide into kernel settings can be found here
That gray bar at the top that defaults to “Direct Lighting” is a dropdown we can use to switch between kernels. There are some settings we’ll need to change for specific kernels, and some that apply to all of them.
Important: Settings for all kernels are stored in any given preset, and whichever kernel is active when we save the preset will be the one we start with.
Direct Lighting (DL) Settings
• Glossy Depth should be 5 to be in line with the recommendations of Octane Standalone. Diffuse depth is fine at 2 unless we want to use GI_DIFFUSE, in which case 4 or 5 is probably a better starting point.
• Parallel Samples should be set to 32 UNLESS you have a GPU with 6GB of VRAM or less or tend to work on scenes that are very VRAM-intensive. This goes up to 512, so if you have gobs of VRAM, you can try a higher value.
• Adaptive Sampling should be ON, and the threshold should be set to 0.02 to be like Standalone. Expected Exposure should be 0.
Path Tracing (PT) and Photon Tracing Settings
• Set the Max Samples to 256. This is enough to see results without needlessly running the GPU.
• Leave the GI Clamp at 1,000,000 - only lower it if you’re running into fireflies that can’t be resolved or are working with non-photoreal scenes.
• Parallel samples should be 32 (same caveat as above).
• Adaptive Sampling ON, Noise threshold at 0.02, Expected Exposure at 0.
Color Management / Tone Mapping
Important: Before we get into the color management settings, a new default introduced in C4D 2026.1 is causing all kinds of havoc with colors in Octane. An entire guide has been written on this issue and we’ll address it later in this guide.
Color Management is a thing. It’s a complex and widely misunderstood topic. Two entire guides (Color Spaces Overview and Octane-specific) have been written about it so far, with probably more to come. That said, when we’re setting up defaults, we’re mostly concerned with what’s widely known in the industry as “Tone Mapping” (even if that term is a little problematic from a technical perspective). This addresses how colors are handled when moving from a much larger color space to a smaller one that our monitors can display.
Octane defaults to straight-up sRGB, which isn’t further processed. A huge amount of data is rendered, and then trimmed off in areas where our screens can no longer display it. If our lighting, materials, objects, etc, aren’t realistic, then this can cause visual artifacts and issues. Even if they are, sometimes we’ll still get problems when the lighting gets a bit more extreme (but still realistic).
We have 4 relatively easy options for “tone mapping”, three of which can be saved in an Octane Preset.
- We can just leave everything at default, use straight sRGB, and try not to blow out our scene with super hot lights or unrealistic material properties.
- We can use ACES Tone Mapping with a single checkbox. It will shift all of our input colors (so if exact corporate colors are necessary, we’ll actually want this OFF) It has a very severe S-curve which will make our scenes a lot higher contrast than we might expect, but it’ll rein in blown highlights effectively. We just go into the Imager tab and check the box that says ACES tone mapping. It’s not kernel-dependent, so we only have to do it once, and then it’ll always be on when we save our preset.
- If we want to use AgX or some other type of OCIO tone mapping, we need to make sure that we have our OCIO config profile loaded properly in Settings>Color mgmt, and then in Imager>OCIO, set the OCIO view and look appropriately. This is all covered in detail in the Octane-specific color management guide. ACES tone mapping needs to be off for this to work properly.
- The fourth option is to do the processing using Output AOVs. It’s possible to set up a standard set of Output AOVs in the C4D render settings, but that’s way out of the scope of this guide.
We can bounce between these, but what we’re doing now is setting up our defaults for a new scene, so we should pick the method we use the most and set that as our default. This guide is going to assume option 1 and make the tone mapping decision more intentional per-project.
Env Tab: Default Environment
Important: Octane needs an environment to render. If we don’t have one in the scene (HDRI, Texture, Sun/Sky rig, etc.), it reverts back to the Default Environment, which is located in the Settings tab, and Env subtab of the Octane Settings window. The default environment is a giant sphere that has a flat, single color as the lighting.
This sphere starts off 90% white. This means if we have a fresh install with all default settings, and drop in a cube and nothing else and hit render, it’ll be evenly lit by an almost-white light from all directions.
As soon as we put in a Texture or HDRI environment (or a sun/sky rig), this default environment will be overridden, but if we forget to do that or don’t need an environment (say we only want to light a scene with emissive materials and/or area lights), then we don’t want this getting in the way and washing out our scene. For this reason, we should set our default preset’s default environment to black so it has no contribution, and forces us to decide what our environment should be like in every scene.
More on this can be found in the Environment Deep Dive guide.
Octane Live Viewer Settings
Some of the top-level Live Viewer settings also save with Octane presets.
The most important setting here is the Lock Resolution toggle. This shows us our scene at 1:1 resolution (1280 pixels across by 1280 down) without scaling, and also only renders the pixels that will show in our final frame. It’s highly recommended to keep this ON so we can get a good sense of how long our renders will take and what the composition looks like.
The other important thing to set here is the Color Space Selector (the dropdown to the right of the Material Picker icon. If we’re using AgX or other OCIO color settings, we want to make sure the Color Space selector is set to the proper OCIO config.
For ACES or straight sRGB with no tone mapping, just leave it at HDR/sRGB.
Global Octane Settings
Almost everything in the Settings tab is global. Global settings do not change per-project.
Important: Be CAREFUL in here. There’s no easy way to reset global settings. Fear not, though, all of the defaults and instructions on how to reset them are located in the troubleshooting section of this guide.
Fortunately we don’t really need to mess with the Settings tab much. There’s only one important thing we need to change: The color picker. Octane has a native color picker that’s linear RGB. This is a little more advanced way of picking colors and may not make a lot of sense to artists coming from 2D or 3D apps where we’re used to a nonlinear color picker with a few different models (HSV or hex or 0-255 sRGB). Fortunately we can change this to C4D-native which does give us all those options we’re used to.
Live Viewer Global Settings
The info overlay state in the Live Viewer is a global setting, meaning it will keep the state regardless of bouncing back and forth between files or changing presets. We can click somewhere in the Live Viewer to toggle these modes. This is a personal preference. If we’re after a clean interface or the overlays get in the way, we can go Minimal. If we care about VRAM but not GPU usage and temps, we can choose Medium, and if we want all the info we can get, we can go Full.
Important: Focus Picker and Material Picker must be OFF, and the render can NOT be paused in order to toggle between Info Overlay states.
If we’re really crunched for space or want to be super minimal, we can right click in the Live Viewer and choose “Toggle Info”. This will turn ALL of it off, including the rendering status and samples at the bottom.
Saving Presets
Important: Whatever kernel we have selected when we add a new preset will be our new default kernel, so we’ll probably want to make sure that’s either set to Direct Light or Path Tracing.
Let’s save our current settings by going to the Presets menu in the Octane Settings window and choosing Add new preset. Let’s name it Lookdev 2026.
If we want to flat-out delete a preset, we can either use (weirdly) Add new preset or Edit presets (which only lets you delete them).
Important: Replacing a preset is tricky and annoying, because the preset needs to be selected first before activating this command. If we didn’t have our preset active, activating it wipes out all the settings we just made, so this can be frustrating. It’s best to just save a new preset and delete the old one and forget the replace preset command even exists.
There’s no concept of importing/exporting individual presets, but there is a presets.dat file that contains all the presets we made that we can move over to a new C4D installation. To access that, we can go to C4D’s main Edit menu, choose Preferences, and at the bottom hit the Open Preferences button. presets.dat is located in the /prefs/ subfolder.
Part III
Building a Default C4D File
Now that the layout and Octane presets are squared away, it’s time to build a starter c4d scene that pops up every time we make a new file. Like the layout and Octane preset, this starter scene should contain things that we use on the daily.
Important: The default C4D file does NOT contain the layout - that’s completely controlled by C4D’s Layouts area in the UI. It DOES contain whatever the current Octane settings are, so we want to make sure we have our LookDev preset active before saving the final version of this file. The saved preset itself does NOT travel with the file, just the current settings.
Setting up the file
Let’s build a new C4D file and save it somewhere.
As of more recent versions of C4D (2023 or 2024), this process got a LOT easier and more straightforward. We can now name our starter file whatever we want (previously it had to be called new.c4d), and we can put it anywhere we want, including in a synced cloud storage account which is great for using it across multiple installations and machines. It’s also much easier to work on now since we don’t have to worry about permissions and editing files in restricted locations.
All we need to do now is save our file (and a tex folder if we want external textures) in some location somewhere, then go into Edit>Preferences, go to the Files section, scroll to the bottom, set Default Scene to Custom, and then find the file we just created.
That’s it! Every new C4D project we create will be based on that file, and now that we have it open, we can continue to edit it and work on it.
Color Management Settings
Important: ACEScg is now the default working color space in C4D as of version 2026.1. This is an issue for Octane, and needs to be changed on every project, so it’s a good idea to save this setting in our default C4D file.
Fortunately, it’s fairly easy to do - we want to hit Ctl-D (Windows) or Command-D (Mac), and under the Color Management tab, click “Change Render Settings” and choose “Legacy (sRGB linear workflow)”.
Note: This does not limit us in any way, nor does it impact us if we want to use ACES in Octane. This is solely about how C4D passes values back and forth with Octane. Octane is expecting sRGB values from C4D. It will then process everything in a physically-accurate way using spectral values, and then allow us to export our render using ACEScg, Linear sRGB, or any other supported color space. More info can be found here on this issue.
C4D Render Settings
C4D Render settings travel with the C4D file, so we want to make sure we set this up properly.
Let’s hit Ctl (or Cmd)-B to open up the Render Settings.
In the Output section, let’s set our scene size. We’re going to use 1280x1280 here because square is a good starter aspect ratio, it fits nicely with our side-by-side layout, and it’s low enough resolution that it should render most things pretty fast. Depending on your monitor, GPU, and what kinds of scenes you normally work on, you may want a different starter resolution.
Next we’ll want to set Octane as the render engine by changing the Renderer dropdown to Octane Renderer. This isn’t strictly necessary, especially if we’re saving files directly from the Live Viewer, but it’s needed if we’re doing AOVs and helpful if we want to send to the Picture Viewer for some reason.
Once we do that, an Octane Renderer section will appear on the left. The only thing we’ll want to do in the Main tab is turn on Use denoised beauty pass which sends the denoised render to the Picture Viewer if we’re using that.
If we’re more advanced, we can also override kernel settings, set up a basic AOV structure, and/or save several different C4D render settings, but in this guide we’re not going to mess with any of that.
Default Objects
Next up we’ll want a few default objects in our scene. Let’s add a new null in the scene and name it “Enviro” (or “Environment” or Scene” or whatever makes sense to you).
Environments
In order to see anything (especially now that we made the default environment black), we’ll need some lighting - let’s create a new HDRI environment and name it “OctaneSky - HDRI”, and a new Texture environment named “OctaneSky - Visible”.
Just to make it easier to find, if we click our Enviro null, go into the Basic tab, and roll down the Icon section, we can set the Icon Color to Custom. This will make it yellow (we can change that if we want).
We’ll notice that when we drop in the Texture environment, it lights up the perspective viewport light gray. This is annoying - it makes finding our objects and reading the UI harder. The quickest way to fix that is to hide our Enviro null from the Viewport (not the render!) by setting the top traffic light to red.
Important: We need to make sure to leave the bottom one gray or else nothing in that null will render or affect the scene.
HDRI Setup
Let’s get a default HDRI into our HDRI environment. C4D has a lot of HDRIs in the Asset Browser drawer on the left (closed by default).
First let’s click the HDRI Environment’s TAG (not the OctaneSky object).
Next - and this is really important - we need to click the ImageTexture Bar.
NOT the dropdown arrow to the left, NOT the folder icon or asset bin to the right. The bar itself. That will open the Image Texture shader that’s specifically set up for an HDRI. If we replace the ImageTexture, all hell will break loose and your scene will blow up into a million pieces and take down your computer.…Ok, maybe that was a little dramatic, but it will have a negative impact on the scene.
Once we’re in the Image Texture node, we can open up the Asset Browser by clicking the icon in the top left next to the X Y and Z filters that looks like a file cabinet drawer. If we type HDRI into the search field, or click the big HDRI link at the top of the list, we can find all of C4D’s built-in HDRIs. If we scroll down, there are a bunch of black and white studio setups - any of those will work. Let’s drag one into the File Field. The nice part about this is that we don’t have to store the HDRI separately and it will work in any install of C4D.
Texture Environment Setup
Now let’s get a nicer backdrop going. We probably don’t want to see the HDRI, and black is a little harsh, so let’s use our Texture environment as a backdrop for when we angle the camera so we can see the sky.
Let’s click our Texture Environment’s (OctaneSky - Visible) Environment Tag - again, not the Octane Sky object, the tag itself.
This setup is a lot easier - we just need to click the white square under RgbSpectrum and change it to a dark gray - H:0, S:0, V:15 works pretty well for a dark gray, or #454545 was used above to be the same color as the illustration backgrounds. The color itself doesn’t matter - it’s personal preference.
Then we need to change the Type to Visible Environment - that will tell Octane to use this as the backplate. The HDRI is already set to Primary Environment which allows it to control the lighting.
Default Object and Camera
Now that our lighting is in place, we want to get the camera set up and get an object in the scene for scale. Cinema 4D’s default primitives are HUGE. The sphere is larger than an average person, which is great for some abstract street sculpture, but not great for most spheres we encounter in the real world. When we’re working in Octane (or any physically based engine), we want our objects to be real world scale. All of the lights and render settings and calculations will just work better this way. Having the default objects be so large can steer us toward making 7 foot tall basketballs rather than 7 foot tall basketball players.
Starter Objects
Let’s drop in a sphere and make it 10cm. That’s about the size of a soccer ball (football/fútbol), or a human head. Another good strategy would be to use a C4D figure, since that would pretty much guarantee we start working at human scale for things, but the sphere is cleaner, so we’re going to go with that for now. Finally, the default sphere has 32 segments. Let’s up this to 100 to make it smoother.
Newer versions of Cinema 4D (even standalone C4D subs) have a capsule called Geometry Axis. This is handy for putting our sphere on the “floor”, but it messes with the center point of non-UV projected textures, so for our starter scene, we’re just going to change the P.Y (Y position) in the sphere’s coordinates to 10 cm so it’s sitting on the floor without messing around with the axis.
Speaking of the floor, a C4D Backdrop object is a useful thing to have in our starter scene. Defaults are fine for this.
Starter Materials
We need some quick materials to catch the HDRI lighting. Let’s open the Material drawer and use our new Universal Material button to make a new one, and then apply it to the sphere. Once again, defaults are fine.
For the backdrop, let’s make a second material and make the Albedo a middle gray - H:0, S:0, V:50, or R:0.27/G:0.27, B:0.27 if we’re using a linear color picker. For this one, turning off specular (H/S/V=0, Float=0) will give us a nice matte base for our sphere. Let’s apply that to the backdrop.
Included in the downloads is a starter file with a procedural grid material in case you’d rather use that.
Important: There’s a bug that happens in C4D sometimes where a new material doesn’t show up after creation. If we click in the Material Manager window (where it should show up), it’ll magically appear.
Starter Camera
Picking a focal length for a lens (or camera, since C4D doesn’t really differentiate) should be a conscious choice in every scene.
Cinema 4D’s camera defaults to 35mm. As any photographer (aside from maybe a street photographer) can tell you, 35mm is one of the more difficult focal lengths to work with. It sits in this awkward position between being a wide angle lens (~18-24mm) which is used for landscapes and big, epic compositions, and a “normal” lens (~50mm) which is close to how a human eye actually sees.
We should be starting with a focal length that works similarly to how we see (50mm) and then consciously choose to alter it depending on our subject matter. Let’s click the C4D Camera Object (not the Octane Camera tag), go to the Object tab and set the focal length (not the sensor size) to 50mm.
Let’s click the little reticle just to the left of the Octane Camera Tag (the crosshairs thing) to turn it white so we know we’re looking through that camera.
Now let’s get a basic framing down. While it’s often a good idea in a scene to start off with the camera at eye level (~160-180cm off the ground), our sphere is pretty small, so it would look like we’re towering over it. Let’s set the camera up so we’re right in front of it looking down on it a bit.
Standing in the middle of the world, but back a bit (Position.X = 0, Position.Z = some negative number), and looking directly “back” into space (Rotation.P = 0) is a good way to audition different HDRIs to test out lighting scenarios without fiddling with rotating them.
We can do all this by setting the Camera object’s coordinates to P.X: 0, P.Y: 52, P.Z: -45, and R.P: 0, R.H: -45, R:B: 0, and leaving the Scale values alone.
Important: These values do not dead-center the sphere, but because the perspective of the custom grid material produces an optical illusion of sorts, it looks a bit more centered. Feel free to tweak them to visually center the sphere better if you need to, or if you’re just using a flat neutral gray with no grid for the backdrop.
If we haven’t been saving our scene, we should do that now.
Final Cleanup
There are a few more settings that travel with the C4D file that aren’t part of any presets we’ve set up so far. Let’s get those settled and then we can call this process done.
Viewport Settings
C4D’s perspective viewport starts out with a number of ‘helper’ overlays that may or may not be all that helpful. There are a few things we can turn off to declutter it.
If we make sure the perspective viewport is active and hit Shift-V, we’ll get the viewport options up.
The Filter tab shows what appears in the viewport. To get the scene as clean as possible, we can turn off Workplane (the grid), World Axis (the big red/green/blue axis thing in the middle of the scene), and Horizon (the single pixel horizontal line that shows the horizon.
We don’t need the extras in the viewport because our starter scene has a backdrop object so we’ll get a sense of where the floor and horizon are, and there’s still a small axis in the upper right of the viewport to help us get oriented. If we find we do really need it for a particular scene, we can always hit shift-v and turn the helpers back on.
If we’re doing a lot of heavy modeling, we might want to turn the workplane back on to help us snap things together, but for general scene composition, it can get in the way.
If we go to the HUD tab, we can turn off View Transform (C4D/RS color management which isn’t relevant to Octane), Active Tool (sometimes gets in the way), and Grid Spacing (we’re working in real world scale, don’t need this unless we’re modeling).
That’s good for the viewport settings, so lastly we should decide whether we want to start in single view (perspective viewport only) or 4-view mode (Perspective/Front/Top/Side). That option gets saved with (and travels with) the file. If we want 4-view, we can frame up the sphere in all the other views by rolling over each one and hitting H.
Final Save
We have our default C4D scene set up the way we want, so let’s make sure the framing is right and our LookDev 2026 Octane Preset is active, and we can save our final file. If we head up to Edit\>Preferences\>Files, we can make sure the Default Scene is set to Custom and pointed at this file we’re working on.
Let’s close the settings window and save our final scene and close it, and then create a new scene to make sure it’s an exact duplicate of the one we just made, and it has all the Octane settings.
Success!
Part IV
Troubleshooting / Reference
Important: The main thing to remember is that every time a new full version of Cinema 4D comes out (full years like 2024, 2025, 2026, etc, not dot releases like 2024.2 or 2024.3.1), it’s a good idea to do this whole process over again - set up new layouts, default files and Octane presets from scratch. It’s also worth revisiting the settings any time a new full year version of Octane comes out and see if our defaults are still valid.
There have been cases where crashes and instability have occurred when using a layout built in an older version of C4D, which is why it’s always good to rebuild it yourself from scratch.
Where the files are
Most of the preference files for C4D and Octane are located in the Users folder, in a folder with the current version of C4D. This can quickly be located by going to Edit>Preferences in the C4D main menu and hitting the Open Preferences button.
There’s a handy bit of text right next to the button that shows you which folder you’re about to open, so that’s nice.
Windows:
C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Maxon\Maxon Cinema 4D 2026_versionnumber
Mac:
Macintosh HD/Users/USERNAME/Library/Preferences/Maxon/Maxon Cinema 4D 2026_versionnumber
/prefs/oct.dat
contains the global Octane preferences.
/prefs/presets.dat
contains all the custom Octane per-project preset sets that we created.
/library/layout/whateverwecalledit.l4d & .prf
is our custom layout.
Resetting Octane’s per-project settings
This can be done pretty easily from the Octane Settings window (gear button). All we need to do is go to the Settings Menu and choose Reset. This will populate all of the per-project settings with the defaults. It will NOT touch the global settings found in the Settings tab, and it won’t mess with any of our saved presets.
Resetting Octane’s global settings
This is more involved. There’s no easy reset for this, so if we want to get back to defaults, we have to open that prefs folder, CLOSE C4D (otherwise Octane will just rebuild the file as soon as we delete it), delete oct.dat from the /prefs/ subfolder, and then launch C4D again.
That, or we can compare against the following screenshots for Octane 2026.1
Wrap Up
This should get you on your way toward working with Octane in C4D more efficiently. If you have any tips or comments, feel free to leave them in the comments section in Behance.