QUICKTIP | The Right Way to Set Up Your Skies in C4D

Hey Arnold Rabinowitz here when you're working with a scene like this in Cinema 4D your first inclination might be to use a dome light with an hdri image for your background but you might want to rethink that let me show you why so here I am in Cinema 4D and let me just get rid of the dome light we're going to start from scratch here I'm going to add in a dome light and then I'm going to go into my browser which by the way you can access by clicking on this right here and I'm going to grab this hdri called Almost clear and I'm going to drag it right onto the texture for the light and we're going to see that in the background and this looks good you know as it is except here's what happens now rotation will work great but the minute we start panning the camera or zooming in the illusion falls apart because the background doesn't move and in the real world there would be some amounts of Parallax so let me show you what I do when I'm working with scenes like this or maybe a space scene with a star field background let's get rid of our dome light right here and I'm going to add in a sphere then I'm going to set the radius to something like 5000. you may need to set that higher for a larger scene okay so now I've got this sphere kind of hanging out in the background and I need to give it a material so let me create a new material and I'm going to apply it to the sphere and then I'm going to double click on the material and get in there and I'm going to add in this hdri and I'm going to drag this right here over the material and I'm going to choose base properties emission color and that means I'll be using this image as an emission map which will light up our sphere with this texture so with the material selected I'm going to go into the settings over here I'm going to drop the weight for the color down to zero so that it's black and then I'm going to do the same thing for the reflection and then I'm going to scroll down all the way to where we get to emission and I'm going to set the emission weight to 1. now I've got this material casting light and if I rotate of course we can see that it's working and I can also pan and there's just a little bit of Parallax right zooming in just a little bit so all in all this is pretty cool like it gives us a really nice believable look for the sky and of course if we want to change the direction of the sky we can grab hold of it and just go into the coordinates and I'll just rotate on the Y and there we go it's worth noting that right now Cinema 4D is still using its default lighting which is fine for setting things up but it's not great for a render and the reason it's using its default lighting is because we haven't actually added a light to the scene we're using this sphere as a light but it's not really a light so Cinema 4D assumes we need light in here so what I suggest you do is maybe try this click on here and choose dome light and what you'll see is that instantly the light changes now we're really truly using this sphere as the source of light and if I turn this dome light off then we can see that the default lights are adding additional illumination so I'm going to turn that back on and we can even set this light to an intensity of zero wouldn't make a difference because the light is actually being blocked by this sphere so that's one way to give ourselves better Environmental Lighting now in doing this we've kind of created a problem that we're going to need to solve so let me show you normally if I wanted to add in some atmosphere I'd go to redshift objects RS environments and usually when you add it to a scene everything goes super white because there's this fog in this environment but we're not seeing it here and we're not seeing it because our sphere is blocking it so if I were to turn this off and now we're going to show you my dome light which is contributing to the environment that is just hugely bright and what I'll do is I'll go back to the redshift environment I'm going to lower scattering down quite a bit bring up attenuation and go down into the rate contribution scales for the camera and really bring that down and you can see what we've got is this foggy environment we've got our our Mountain our little island thing here our water and this background which is white but we don't have our sky so now we've got the environment so how do we solve this problem well what I'm going to do is I'm going to first of all just get rid of the redshift environment and I'm not going to need this dome light I'm going to turn the sphere back on and I don't need this texture so I'm going to delete that and we're just going to have this sphere and I'll add in an area light so go down here to area light and in the area light settings I'll scroll down to where it says area shape and instead of rectangle I'm going to choose mesh and then I'll take my sphere and I'm going to drop that into the mesh so now it's using the sphere as the source of light but we can't see it and the reason is because we need to turn on bi-directional right now it's lighting up the outside of the sphere if we turn this on we're lighting up the inside and we also want to make it visible so that we can see the sky now the problem is we have this white background round but we don't have our texture on there so what I'll do is I'll grab hold of the same spherical texture that we've been using and I'm going to drop it right here by texture and we're not really seeing it right now because it's so bright we have to bring things down a little bit let me come back up here and I'm going to set the intensity down to one and now it looks like our regular sky so now let's try it again we'll choose redshift objects RS environment and that's going to blow things out and we can just go in and make some changes here we can lower the amount of camera ray contribution we can lower the amount of scattering and we can start to see our our sky and our background bring up attenuation and we get a bit of an atmosphere and we can even brighten up that atmosphere give it that blue tint that you'll sometimes see by going over to a mission and I'll change the color to like a pale blue and there's other settings you can play with as well but the point is that now when I uh move the camera I can see the sky moving with it if I zoom in it moves with it and we get this nice atmosphere along with everything else as always I hope that this helps you and your work once again I'm Alan Rabinowitz thanks for watching

Channel: Aharon Rabinowitz

Views: 18,962

Keywords: Cinema4D, C4D, Redshift, Redshift3d, Tutorial, C4DTutorial, Redshifttutorial, 3Dtutorial, 3DEnvironments, AtmosphericEffects, VFX, VisualEffects

Id: TnpFaaEMOD8

Length: 6min 13sec (373 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 13 2023