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"How to light" |
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Let's get started Load the example scene. It features Cinema 4D's standard "editor" illumination. This will be the starting point of this tutorial. Now, render the image...  It doesn't look really impressive, don't you think ? We will begin by placing a light source that will act as the sunlight. For this we will use a spotlight with soft shadows, a high resolution shadow map and a brightness of 200%. This is quite a good simulation of sunlight.  Then I added a simple plane with the alpha texture of a tree between the light source and the window. By doing this, the shadows in the room are getting more interesting.  Natural sunlight doesn't generate soft shadows, but area shadows. As Cinema 4D includes these kind of shadows, we will use them. If the rendering time are getting too long reduce the accuracy of the area shadow (samples), and increase it afterwards for the final render.  The scene is already looking much better. As we can see the area shadows generate wonderful light and shadow patterns in the room. The shadows of the tree are scattered and blurred, while the table casts hard shadows. By changing from hard on the left to soft on the right, the shadow also enhance the illumination. However, as we used only one light source, the shadows are still too dark. To brighten the scene we will activate radiosity.  As you can notice, only small parts of the image are brighter. The left side of the image is still darker than the illumination we would expect from windows. In the "real world", the environment light would also pass through the windows and illuminate the left side of the scene. To simulate this we will use an HDRI map and the "Advanced Render" module. In the archive, you will find an HDRI map depicting a room illuminated by the light coming from two windows. Create a new material and load the HDRI map in the luminance channel, then assign this material to a sphere surrounding the whole scene.  In a natural environment, we would also expect the area directly illuminated by the sunlight to be slightly brighter. Like we all know, white houses in southern countries are dazzling in direct sunshine. To achieve this, we will use another feature of the "Advanced Render": the Glow post-effect. You can activate it in the post effect menu of the render settings.  By adding a Glow post effect the image is getting softer. With more details, other textures and radiosity settings adapted to the textures, the result of this tutorial can look like this...  I hope this tutorial was interesting and that I'll find the time to write something else soon... Until then, |