Infinite floor not working in After Effects & Cinema 4D Lite

I recently upgraded to the Adobe Creative Cloud & one feature I was really looking forward to trying out was the Cinema 4D Lite package within After Effects. I’ve experimented with Cinema 4D before, mainly just creating a couple of random objects here and there, but only ever with the trial version.

One thing I had used in my previous projects was the infinite background (or seamless floor effect) that acts as a nice setting for the 3D objects (Greyscalegorilla has a great tutorial on how to put it together). However, after creating a test project with the infinite background in Cinema 4D Lite I then switched over to After Effects and found that the background object wasn’t appearing in the composition:

This is the render within Cinema 4D:

And this was the result when switching to After Effects:

As you can see the background object wasn’t appearing which is obviously less than ideal! After searching around for quite a while I eventually found a forum topic that shed some light on the issue.

How to fix the issue:

The background object is still there but for some reason it’s displayed as an alpha channel instead. The instructions below show how to change this:

In the After Effects project panel right click your Cinema 4D file and choose: Interpret Footage > Main.

When the interpret footage window pops up you should see an ‘Alpha’ section right at the top, choose ‘Ignore’

This should then display the background object in your composition!