What Actually Transfers
Every material, texture, light, camera and render setting MAX2C4D carries across — and what each becomes on Corona, V-Ray and Redshift. Measured on real client scenes, not compiled from a feature list.
If you have been burned by a converter that promised everything, this is the page to read before you buy. It includes the handful of things that don't transfer.
How to read this
- Delivered
- The path exists and is measured against 3ds Max's own output.
- Partial
- It comes across, but some settings do not. Those are named in the import log.
- No equivalent
- The target engine has nothing that could receive it — a Corona Slicer has no Redshift counterpart. It falls back to the closest material and says so.
- Not handled
- Not converted on that target. Use one of the other two.
Nothing is ever dropped in silence. Whatever a target engine cannot take is written to the import log by name, with its value, so you know exactly what to redo by hand instead of hunting for it.
Corona materials
Sixteen types, all delivered to Corona for Cinema 4D. The V-Ray and Redshift columns say what the same material becomes when you change target.
| 3ds Max type | to Corona | to V-Ray | to Redshift |
|---|---|---|---|
| CoronaPhysicalMtl | Delivered | Delivered | Delivered |
| CoronaLegacyMtl | Delivered | Delivered | Delivered |
| CoronaLayeredMtl | Delivered | Delivered | Delivered |
| CoronaLightMtl | Delivered | Delivered | Delivered |
| CoronaSelectMtl | Delivered | Delivered | Delivered |
| CoronaPortalMtl | Delivered | Delivered | Delivered |
| CoronaRaySwitchMtl | Delivered | Delivered | No equivalent |
| CoronaHairMtl | Delivered | Delivered | Partial |
| CoronaShadowCatcherMtl | Delivered | Partial | Partial |
| CoronaSkinMtl | Delivered | Partial | Partial |
| CoronaToonMtl | Delivered | Partial | Partial |
| CoronaVolumeMtl | Delivered | Not handled | Partial |
| CoronaScannedMtl | Delivered | Not handled | No equivalent |
| CoronaFabricMtl | Delivered | Not handled | No equivalent |
| CoronaSlicerMtl | Delivered | Not handled | No equivalent |
| CoronaOutlineMtl | Delivered | Not handled | No equivalent |
CoronaPhysicalMtl carries clearcoat, sheen, subsurface scattering, volumetrics, complex IOR, thin film, dispersion, and the Glints layer from Corona 15.
V-Ray materials
Fifteen types. The middle column is the Corona fallback, used when V-Ray for Cinema 4D is not installed — so nothing on this list arrives empty.
| 3ds Max type | native V-Ray | Corona fallback | to Redshift |
|---|---|---|---|
| VRayMtl | Delivered | Delivered | Delivered |
| VRayLightMtl | Delivered | Delivered | Delivered |
| VRayBlendMtl | Delivered | Delivered | Delivered |
| VRay2SidedMtl | Delivered | Delivered | Delivered |
| VRayFastSSS2 | Delivered | Delivered | Delivered |
| VRayCarPaintMtl / 2 | Delivered | Delivered | Delivered |
| VRayFlakesMtl / Stochastic | Delivered | Delivered | Delivered |
| VRayToonMtl | Delivered | Delivered | Delivered |
| VRayBumpMtl | Delivered | Delivered | Delivered |
| VRayOverrideMtl | Delivered | Delivered | Delivered |
| VRayHairNextMtl | Delivered | Delivered | Partial |
| VRayMtlWrapper | Not handled | Delivered | Delivered |
| VRayScatterVolume | Not handled | Delivered | Partial |
| VRaySwitchMtl | Partial | Delivered | Partial |
| VRaySkinMtl | Partial | Partial | Delivered |
VRayPlane is the one flat refusal: Cinema 4D has no V-Ray infinite plane to build.
Redshift and 3ds Max native materials
The Redshift surface is covered end to end — 152 of 152 classes: 24 materials, 123 texmaps, 6 lights, the renderer and the modifiers. Any RS_* class not named individually is handled by a generic engine that reads it by introspection and rebuilds the matching node — 142 classes, 1,380 value ports, validated on a generated scene where 126 of 127 produce the expected node with no warnings.
3ds Max native materials · 4 types
Third-party plugins · 2 types
Both third-party maps become a Corona Multi Shader, with per-layer probabilities, disabled layers, seed, blur and hue/saturation/gamma randomisation.
Textures and shaders
Each texture keeps its colour space (sRGB, linear, ACEScg), gamma, alpha setting, tiling, output curve, per-channel corrections and UDIM tokens — not just its file path.
Corona · 21 types
V-Ray · 17 types
3ds Max native · 15 types
Geometry and scene structure
Editable Poly and Editable Mesh. Quads preserved rather than triangulated.
Parents, children and groups.
Rebuilt as C4D layers, including names written by a localised 3ds Max.
Position, rotation, scale, pivot offset. Look At constraints are recomputed — 3ds Max never writes them down.
Every map channel, indexed so all three engines read the right one.
Since the move to Alembic. OBJ cannot carry them at all.
matIDs become polygon selection tags, which is what makes Multi/Sub-Object usable.
Smoothing groups, plus explicit normals rebuilt when 3ds Max refuses its own.
Render Instances on the 3ds Max route. The native reader builds them as full meshes.
A .max stores the recipe, not the result: only 3ds Max can replay those. This is why the 3ds Max route exists.
Lights and cameras
CoronaLight in every shape, CoronaSun.
VRayLight (plane, disc, sphere, dome, mesh), VRaySun, VRayIES.
rsPhysicalLight, rsDomeLight, rsSunLight, rsSunSkyLight. rsPortalLight is approximated.
Omni, Target and Free Spot, Directional, Target Directional.
Free and Target, in Sphere, Area, Disc, Cylinder and Linear variants. IES profiles included.
A light taken out of reflections or fog stays out of them.
Physical, Free and Target, including VRayPhysicalCamera and CoronaCam.
Focus distance and target distance, at their real values.
Redshift effects attached to a camera transfer in full.
Environment, sky and atmospherics
Corona Sky, VRaySky, RS Physical Sky — and the sky arrives with its sun.
With its projection, offset and intensity.
A scene can show one image to the camera, another in reflections, a third in refractions. All three are read.
Scene fog, absorption, scattering.
V-Ray atmospherics, on both routes.
Approximated, and said so in the log.
OCIO and ACES aligned with the 3ds Max scene. Legacy maps to basic mode.
Render settings and image
Optional, governed by the Override render settings tickbox.
The whole stack, carried to all three targets. Read on Corona 5, 6 and 15, whose addresses differ.
Bloom and glare, denoising, ray depths, exposure. A Corona 5 scene went from 3 settings transferred to 50.
115 addresses read natively, plus the VFB2 layer stack.
Engine settings and camera PostFX.
Each material carries its own instead of one scene-wide value, which used to darken thick glass.
Unreachable from MaxScript. Open debt.
Scatter, proxies and decals
Sources, spline-bounded areas, density curves, its own layer. Hidden sources are no longer thrown away.
Converted to a scatter on the 3ds Max route. The native reader does not read it.
File path and transform, on both routes.
Size, projection, angle limits, mask, material and the object list.
On the 3ds Max route only.
On the 3ds Max route only.
Resolved once every object is built.
Splines and modifiers
3ds Max stores a type per point — smooth, corner or bezier. Translated, instead of arriving as straight segments.
A spline with Enable In Renderer arrives as a Sweep, at the right thickness and side count.
A curve rendered as a tube does have a surface to shade.
Open debt — the tangents have not been measured yet.
Becomes a Subdivision Surface.
Becomes a Cloth Surface.
Matching generators.
Matching deformers.
Becomes a projection on the texture tag.
Box, Sphere, Cylinder, Plane and Tube are rebuilt as C4D primitives instead of arriving empty.
Nothing to do: baked UVs are already in the channels, the conversion is neutral, the transform composes into the matrix.
What needs the 3ds Max route
MAX2C4D ships two ways of reading a .max, on purpose. The native reader needs nothing installed; the 3ds Max route lets Max itself supply the values, which is the only way to get four of them. If your scenes rely on these, keep a Max seat around — one is enough for a whole studio, since everyone else imports the folder it exports.
- VRayClipper
- VRayFur
- ForestPack
- Instances (copies arrive as full meshes)
One file type neither route opens
A .max saved with 3ds Max's “Compress on save” option is encoded with a codec Cinema 4D does not ship, so the native reader cannot open it — 5 of the 183 files in our test corpus. MAX2C4D names the option and gives you the two ways round it: re-save from 3ds Max with the box unticked, or import through the 3ds Max route.
Why these numbers are checkable
A .max file does not say what its data means. It stores values at numeric addresses, and the meaning of those addresses lives compiled inside 3ds Max and each render engine. An address off by one row raises no error — it produces a scene that is plausible and wrong. A reflection slightly too hard, a glass slightly too dense, and nobody notices until the final render.
MAX2C4D avoids that trap because it has both routes. The same scene goes out through the native reader and through real 3ds Max, and the two results are compared automatically, value by value. The truth is never written by hand — 3ds Max supplies it.
Current result: 80,207 identical values, 0 divergent, across 37 scenes and 2,529 materials, covering 240 decoded classes and 2,914 named properties.
Stop rebuilding your
entire scene by hand.
Every hour you spend rebuilding materials, relinking textures, and reconfiguring lights and render settings is an hour you're not rendering, not iterating, not billing. MAX2C4D pays for itself on the first scene.
1-year license — not a subscription. Nothing renews automatically.