Once you've done this you'll want to apply the material to the planet object. Rename this material to "planet_surface". Start by creating a new material in the material manager, and then open it in the material editor. Now, once the render region has been set up you can start working on the material. This is handy when you need to get an overall sense for the scene rather than seeing the exact details. As you lower the indicator it reduces the settings. If you drag this triangle to the top of the preview region then it will use the exact settings you have set in the render settings. Clicking and dragging this triangle allows you to control the quality of the render preview. Finally once you have a size that you like there's a small triangle on the right side of the preview region. This means you can click and drag to reposition a preview region and if you hold the mouse over the small squares on the corners,n or at the midpoint of the edges you'll be able to resize the preview region. Now, if you hold your mouse over the edges of the box you'll see that the cursor changes. When you do this you will see the preview region represented by a dotted rectangle in the view port appear and the render will start.
Then at the bottom of the list select the interactive render region. Click and hold the render the picture viewer on icon.
Now, if you happen to see the UV grid in the view port like you do here then make sure the switch back into object mode using the toggles on the left, and disable the axis modification toggle. So, to start exploring procedural texturing more The next material you'll create is for the planet, but first, you'll want to set up the interactive render region to make previewing the changes to your material quick and easy. The Fresnel shader is just one of many shaders that function this way, and it's important to understand how you can start to utilize these shaders as it can save you time from having to prepare textures in Photoshop first, and even help add variation to your textures to give them a more natural appearance. That is they have attributes that you can adjust for basic control over the shaders results. It can also be independent from the texture projection, and probably most important is that these shaders are parametric. The shader itself is calculated new with every frame. While it may seem like the key thing here is that this effect not as been achieved through other means it's not the only part of it.
Now, you already had a glimpse of what procedural texturing is when you used the Fresnel shader as the Fresnel shader reacted to the angle of the camera to the object surface, and provided you with a gradient that could be used to visualize that angle. This is a handy tool for previewing changes to materials you make in your scene allowing you to preview how the material will look in your scene with out having to render to the picture viewer. You will also learn about the Interactive Render Region. This means that you need something more than just a flat color, and something more than an image sequence which would also suffer from possible issues with texture projections, and on some objects would require proper UV's.
In this case you want to create a material that has variation in the surface, but also that is generated directly within Cinema 4D so that it can react to the lights in the scene. In this video you're going to create the material for the planet.