1.Open Cinema 4d and a render you want to add a material to. If you have not learned how to render yet, please take the following tutorials:
2. Materials can be very complicated, and very simple. In this tutorial, I will cover the basic material options to give you more room to experiment, and for the sake that the more simple we keep a material, the quicker it will render ;). First locate the Materials Browser at the bottom of cinema 4d:
3.Click File > New Material from the Materials Browser. A grey sphere will appear in the browser. This is an example of what your new material looks like. When we are done, it wont look nearly the same. Select the sphere by clicking on it, and then look to the right of cinema 4d in your Attributes tab:
4.The first thing we will do is select every attribute we want this material to have. To do this, select the "Basic" button in the attributes tab. This will bring up the following menu:
5. This is where you will select all of the attributes you want your material to have. We don't want to many right now, I will go over the most popular attributes in my opinion. Select the Reflection (Keep the default Color and Specular settings checked too) attribute. Your Basic Attributes should now look like this:
6. Now select the Color settings in your attributes tab. Select a color by using the scrollers under the color gradients. I have selected a blue using the following settings:
7. Now Move on to the Secular settings in your attributes tab (I have skipped Reflection, but that shouldn't stop you from going and experimenting with them. I actually recommend setting the brightness of the reflection down a bit). There are a few things that you can mess around with in the Specular settings that will change the way your render looks, but in this tutorial, we will be making the surface of your render look like metal. Fill out the settings like I have (Again, its all about opinions, choice, and experimenting in abstract art, so choose what you like!):
9. We are now ready to apply the material to our render. This is probably the simplest step of the tutorial (although it can take a while to load). Simply drag your material out of the materials browser, and onto the render. Simple as that, its applied.
10. Now its ready to be rendered!
My advice to everyone who takes this, take it again, and play around with all of the settings. It will help you a ton, trust me!
More 3D Graphics: 
