Cinema 4D | 9 Lighting Tips

[Music] hey what is up guys this is Eli and in this video I will go over nine lighting tips to make your renders go faster and to make your scenes look better if you look at a lot of videos where people show how they set up their render settings you will notice most of them use the global illumination effect on it this is a quick and easy way to set up some nice lighting for your scene but it is also very slow to render like in this example you can see it is almost taking 6 minutes to render this low poly scene and that is just one frame so an animation would take a lot of time to do but what most people forget is that there is another simple way to set up the lighting which will render in a fraction of the time and almost looks identical to the global illumination so let's disable the global illumination in the render settings but make sure the alien conclusion is still turned on then all you need to do is creating a light scroll down and check the ambient illumination option at render again and this time you can see it rendered in less than a minute and you can see the difference is mostly the brightness but that can be changed by decreasing the intensity of the light itself and another difference is that the colors bounce off each other but that is something you either like or not in this case I even like it more when the colors just stay isolated on the object itself and don't bounce off each other right now this scene looks a little boring especially at the left side of the screen but if I add some shadows to the side it instantly looks more interesting now let's take a look how I did this you can see I set up a light that is pointing towards the objects and in between the line of the lights and the objects I placed a shadow catcher which is hidden in the subdivision surface so let's disable the smoothing and you can see these are just some planes where I cut out some of the polygons in the middle and on the edges to make some random pattern and after that I place them inside of the subdivision surface to make it smoother this way the shadows on the floor will look like there are some trees just outside of the scene I have to admit that lining up the shadows is a little tricky but there is a nice trick to do this which is going to the top of the viewports and going in the options menu and enable the shadows option this way you can see where the shadows will be cast without even rendering as I mentioned earlier using a global illumination in your scene is an easy way to make things look better but it also takes a lot of time to render but something else you should know is that rendering a dark scene with global illumination takes a lot more time than rendering a bright scene so in this example you can see the dark scene is rendered in 1 minute and 22 seconds and the bright scene is rendered in just 46 seconds so that is almost half of the time maybe you like the lighting in the previous tip so let's take a look how you can do this yourself all there is to it is adding two large spheres to your scene which you could compare to a lamp or something the next thing you need to do is creating a new material and only keep the luminance channel turned on you can keep these settings on default also make sure the material is applied to the spheres and now as a final thing you need to make sure the global illumination option is turned on and I also recommend using a secondary method which will give it more brightness and more accuracy also one last thing I added just to make it look better is adding a small light behind the puppets which is some kind of edge light to separate the puppets from the backgrounds this way you can see we get some smooth looking light sometimes you render your 3d model and it just looks a little flat it misses some kind of highlights on the edges you could go in every material and crank up the reflectance of it but an easier way to get more reflection on the edges is adding a new light in this case I will turn it a little blue so it is easier to see the reflections and talking about also crank up the intensity to something like 200% so it is stronger than all the other lights in the scene and the last thing we need to do is disabling the diffuse option and also the GI illumination this way the light is not lighting anything of the scene so it isn't getting any brighter but it will only affect the specular channel of the light so that means no reflections on the edges now if you move the light you should be able to see how the reflection is being casted on the object so move it to a nice spot according to your scene and render again to have some nice reflections on the edges in this case you can see it really well in the middle of the seat so you just muddled a low-poly scene but it looks ugly and you don't feel like creating a whole lighting setup luckily there's a quick and easy way to light here and low-poly scenes which can be done by adding a physical sky object and then the time and location tap you can set the time to anything you like so in this case we would go for something that is in this summer maybe something in the evening close to the sunset after that you can go in the render settings at the top here add an a Myint occlusion effect and also a global illumination effect and then the global illumination we will set the secondary method to quasi Monte Carlo qmc in short and the last thing you may want to do is increasing the gamma to make it brighter so something like 2 will do and as you can see this is a quick and easy way to make your scene look better if you want to light your scene in a realistic way an area light is the way to go but there are a lot of things that affect the look of the shadow and delight itself so I'm going to place this light just in front of this tree pointing down a little let's also make sure to add an area shadow to this and I'm going to render out every change I make on this so this first light is kind of close to the tree and also very small compared to the tree and you can see we get a large and slightly sharp shadow now let's make this bigger at the same distance and you can see we get a much softer shadow now let's move this back a little and render again that you can see the shadow is still quite soft but also more intense than the previous one now finally keep it at the same distance but make it a lot smaller again and you can see the shadow is quite sharp and defined it is easy to tell the size and distance of your area light makes a lot of difference in the look of your scene maybe you remember this place thank you if you did but what I want to show you in this tip is if you render a dark scene so in this case a night scene is that some shadows can become quite grainy and of course you don't want this in your smooth looking renders there are some small things you can do to fix this first of all the easiest and fastest way to fix this is changing the renderer from standard to physical it will take more time to learn under this but it will also look a lot smoother in my example if i zoom in on the side of the building you can still see some grainy parts on the windows and next to the railing so a next thing you could do is going into your render settings again and your physical options and down here you have the shadows subdivision field by default it is set at 2 if you want more information on what this does or anything in cinema 4d actually is right-clicking on it and going to show help so right here you can see how smooth it looks if you set the maximum value to 16 on the right or how grainy it looks if you set it to 0 please be aware if you cranked up this value the rendering will go a lot slower a last step I would like to share with you guys is how to light a scene with reflective materials in it but it is also a good way to light any scene that needs to look realistic without too much effort so in this example I just want to render this lounge chair on an infinite floor so to do that I edit and compositing tag on the floor and check the compositing background this way combined with a background object it is infinite but right now there is no lighting going on so what you could do is go into the material manager and clicking on create load material presets then under basically any of the versions you can go inside of it and two presets that there should be something like light setups and here you have all the high dynamic range images that come with cinema 4d by default and if you click on one of them you get a new material with the image projected on it to apply this material to the scene you need a sky object and apply the material on the sky the next thing you need to do to make the sky emit light on your scene is going in the render settings again and adding a global illumination now in this case because we have an infinite floor and there is one more thing I need to do and that is adding a compositing tag to the background now let's select both the compositing tech of the background and d4 so we can go in the options and disable the cast shadows option and also the scene by GI option this way the floor and the background will not interfere with the sky we just created another thing you should do is adding a compositing tag to the sky so we can disable the scene by camera option otherwise you would always see the image in the background which we don't want of course and that way if you render you will get some nice reflections and also some nice lighting for your scene which is also interchangeable so if you go in the material and go to the luminance channel you can see the texture here which can be any HDR image so if you don't have the presets and your version like I do you can just find some HDR images on Google and apply them to this luminance channel that is all there is to it so that were nine fast lighting tips for you guys I hope they will help in whatever you're making right now also if anything in this video was unclear to you don't hesitate to leave a comment and I will try to get to you I hope you liked it and I will see you in the next one bye

Channel: Twistereli

Views: 70,246

Keywords: c4d, cinema 4D, 3D, beginner, tutorial, tips, quick tip, course, learn, light, lighting, render, rendering, global illumination, shadowcaster, low poly, light studio, light setup, hdri, ambient occlusion, faster renders, speed up, easy, workflow, area light, specular, starter, how to, noob, maxon, twistereli, mobox graphics, Global illumination alternative, Shadowcaster, Soft lighting, Increased highlights on edges, Quick & easy low poly lighting, Area light variables, Remove shadow noise

Id: 4C9ssEEToIA

Length: 9min 50sec (590 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 27 2018