Rendering the easy way in Cinema 4D

hey guys Jimmy's here wouldn't be great if you could lighten render your cinema4d scenes in an easy and understandable way while also getting super realistic results and all that just by using cinemas native renderers that's what we're going to learn today when it comes to 3d programs things can get quite complicated really fast cinema 4d is no exception no matter how much easier it is compared to other 3d applications so whenever we can take a shortcut of course we'll take it so forget about having to modify lots of settings or global illumination and be an occlusion caustics you can get all those things for free or get also having to modify lights and light settings you don't have to worry about those as well so what's the catch of course there's always a catch and in this case its speed your renders and most of the cases will be a lot slower but at the same time you will simplify your workflows and get very realistic results without having to buy and learn an external renderer so this method won't completely replace the workflows you already know especially if you're on a tight deadline but if you have the luxury of time you will get much better results without too much of a hassle let's say what we need in order to make this happen our main ingredients are two things the first one as materials that use only the reflectance channel of course transparent and luminance materials don't need to have the reflectance enabled but for everything else we will use reflectances or base the other ingredient is luminance surfaces we will use those to replace lights and cinema let's load up a scene and see how we can set it up the easy way this is a typical cinema 4d scene it uses a white color in the color Channel and has an area light on the left side without any GI enabled this is how it renders nothing new here let's see how we can modify the scene to get some nicer results let's first enable the physical render and then the progressive render so we can have some fast feedback when I prepare a scene for rendering I want to start with total darkness I don't want any other lights affecting my scene or anything else giving lights to the scene so I'm going to delete the light we already have in there and also make sure that the default light is disabled and now we're getting a nice black screen and that concludes our tutorial I'm dragging let's modify our material to see how we can get the results we need we need to get rid of the color Channel and use the reflectance channel instead let's delete whatever is there and create a new diffuse material a diffuse material is basically a material that has a 100% roughness so we can achieve that look with almost all of these models except the legacy specular models the only difference would be how the diffuse material looks like each model has its own look so you can choose whatever you like most I'm going to go with the lab version model this base layer is basically the equivalent of the color Channel and of course if we want we can then stack other things like glossiness on top we can turn down the specular strength all the way down to zero we don't need to touch this value ever again we can leave it at the default value as well it's just that when using geometry slides having the specular channel above zero won't make any difference to our render the other thing we need to do is to choose a more realistic value for our base color the pure white is something that doesn't exist in real life so let's tone it down to something more reasonable now of course we still cannot see anything in the render because we don't have any lights let's see what we can do about that as I mentioned before we don't want to deal with cinnamons myriad light options we want to keep things simple so we'll use geometry to illuminate our scene I usually go with two different geometries the first one is a sphere which represents more of a regular light source and the other one is a plane which is basically the equivalent of a softbox for photographers let's start with a sphere and assign aluminum material to it let's start with 100% luminance and we can slowly fine-tune from there and as you can see now we have lights in our scene isn't that amazing or what the beauty with this setup is that we have really simple controls for our lights big light means more light in our scene and small light means less light and harder shadows and that's all you need to remember you can also adjust the luminance value so I can keep my sphere the same size and increase the brightness you to make everything brighter so to recap make light means more light and seen small light means less light add also the luminance value into the mix and you can do pretty much everything you could do with regular lights but without all the settings now the beauty of this method is that you can implement all the tricks photographers would use in the real world in order to light the scene as you can see this site is quite dark if we want to brighten up this side a bit more we could either add a light that is not as intense as our main light or we can have a bounce card this card bounces the light from our light source on the opposite side to create this bounce card we just create a plane and a diffuse material to it in this case we will make the value as white as possible and now our shadows are a little bit lighter one thing to keep in mind in order to get cleaner renders faster is to enable the GI area light option in the luminaire material settings it was already enabled in this scene so let's see the effect on another one this is with a GI area light option off and this is with a GI area light option on as you can see if the difference is quite amazing we get much cleaner results much much faster this though will only get you this far to eliminate all noise in the scene you need to adjust some other values as well if you're using progressive you should increase the blurriness subdivision value but since progressive is slower to clean up you should use the adaptive option I'm using progressive only when setting up the scene and if I want to finish a render at a specific time 1 2 minutes etc in the adaptive setting the main values that will clean up your renders are the shading subdivisions and the blurriness subdivisions higher values will give you cleaner results of course at the expense of render time if you're using depth of field then you also need to adjust the sampling subdivisions if you're not using depth of field you can turn it all the way down to 0 with no effect to your render of course as I mentioned before this method is going to be costly rendering wise but this is something you need to weigh while working on your project do I need speed or can I afford to wait let's see how the scene can be setup for GI we'll switch back to the color channel as our diffuse based layer and we will disable the diffuse layer in the reflectance Channel now we will enable GI and use Q MC as primary method and light mapping and secondary method let's hit render and see what kind of results we can get as you can see the results are similar there are some differences here and there but if you want to save time there is no denying that the GI method is almost three times faster than the brute force method so if you want to be physically accurate you can choose the brute force method and if you want to save time you can choose the GI method in both cases we get rid of all the settings we need to remember for lights other things you can do to increase the speed of the brute force method is to render your scene in low settings and then apply noise reduction to it so for example this render is super clean but this one took much less time to render and we got it cleaned up with noise reduction in post the image with the noise reduction is a little bit softer but you save up quite a bit of time and you can always sharpen it afterwards for still images I like using defined to a great plugin from Nick which also happens to be free for moving images you can use other tools like neat video you'll find the links for both of these plugins in the description below just to recap to convert cinema 4d materials to pure reflectance based materials you don't need to do anything particularly complex the only thing you need to remember is that the base diffuse layer will be in the reflectance channel instead of the color Channel so for example in this wooden material all we need to do is move the texture from the color channel to a diffuse layer in the reflection channel whatever else you need to add to the material you just add it as a separate layer and the reflection channel with this method you can achieve great-looking results without the need to get an external engine all you need is already there in cinema with the added effect of making a procedure such as lighting a scene even simpler and that's about it for now if you have any questions about this method in the comments below hope you enjoy the video and see you on the next one

Channel: Dimitris Katsafouros

Views: 72,456

Keywords: unbiased rendering, cinema 4d, c4d, physical render, rendering, reflectance channel, lighting with geometry, fJh.C7A3E6Yfrwt@7&7EV.

Id: S89EI64aIC0

Length: 8min 52sec (532 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 21 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/b_marl]

Learning something new every day :)
Thanks Dimi

[u/nytol_7]

that was concise and satisfying. perfect recipe for a fast tutorial video - cheers!

[u/lordmouse]

Thanks for posting this !

[u/biskyfriscuit]

Excellent !

[u/[deleted]]

cool, i remember GSG doing something like this before but i dont think they went as in depth. very helpful