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    Cinema 4D Tutorial #3: HDRI Lighting: Created by Jaryth Frenette

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    Ka Ra

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    Cinema 4D Tutorial #3: HDRI Lighting: Created by Jaryth Frenette

    Uploaded by

    Ka Ra
    66 views5 pages

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    66 views5 pages

    Cinema 4D Tutorial #3: HDRI Lighting: Created by Jaryth Frenette

    Uploaded by

    Ka Ra

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 5

    Cinema 4D Tutorial #3: HDRI Lighting

    Created by Jaryth Frenette

    © Copyright 2006 Jaryth F. P a g e | 1


    Introduction

    This Tutorial will run you thought the basics of setting up a scene to use HDRI lighting. As well as
    Global Illumination settings for rendering the scene properly.

    Using HDRI lighting has its pros and cons. If you use it, you can archive stunningly realistic renders,
    without having to set up a complex lighting rig. You can also match a specific lighting scene (such as
    a forest, a kitchen, almost anything) to perfection.

    However, deepening on how much detail is being put into the scene, it can cause very lengthily
    render times. Thus is the price of realism.

    Note: This tutorial is only for people with the Advanced Render Plug-in that comes with most editions
    of Cinema 4D.

    © Copyright 2006 Jaryth F. P a g e | 2


    Starting Off
    The first (and probably most important) step in setting up HDRI lighting is to find an High Dynamic
    Range Image. These are NOT Images rendered WITH HDRI (as SOME people may think…). They
    are their own format. You will find these images with a “*.hdr” extension. You can find many very high
    quality and resolution probes at http://www.debevec.org/Probes/ . (a Probe is just a type of HDRI
    which encompasses a large view).

    If you lay the probe flat and looked at it, it would look like this :

    This will be the Probe we will be using for this tutorial. This
    Particular probe is the Kitchen probe. (named
    „kitchen_probe.hdr‟).

    Now, as you can see by looking at it, it has odd black stuff
    around the edges, and if we stuck that as out lighting now, it
    would be uneven, and unrealistic. Luckily Cinema 4D has a
    solution for that.

    With that being said, open up Cinema 4D. When it loads, go to


    Plug-in at the top, then Advanced Render, then Convert HDR
    Probe. It will open a file box. Navigate to the „kitchen_probe.hdr‟ file. Then hit Open. What it will do, is
    it will convert all of the verities on the picture, to that of a 3D sphere. When it‟s done it will pop up with
    the finished image. You can simply close that. If you look in the directory that the „kitchen_probe.hdr‟
    file was in, you will now see a „kitchen_probe_con.hdr‟ file as well. That is the file we will be using to
    light our scene.

    Setting up the Scene


    Now, if you have a premade scene, feel free to use that. If not, then simply create a Floor object, drag
    it down 100m on the Y-axis, then crate a Sphere. Create a texture, named it ball, leave the colour as
    white, and change the brightness to 100%. Uncheck Specular, and check Reflection. Change the
    reflection brightness to 6%. Duplicate the Ball texture, and name the second one Floor. On the floor
    texture, check the Bump, and add a Noise texture. Change the Noise type to FBM, and the Octaves
    to 6.1. click on Bump again, and change the strength to -7 %. Add the Ball material to the Sphere,
    and the floor to the floor. Simple enough eh :D.

    Setting up Lighting
    On to the fun part.
    Start off by creating a sphere. Then resize it so that all of you scene fits inside it (for the example
    scene, giving this sphere a Radius of about 1200m should work fine). Now duplicate that sphere
    (Ctrl+c, Ctrl+v). Name one sphere GI, and the Other one Visible.
    As the names suggest, one of the spheres will be visible when we render and the other one will be for
    GI (GI is the lighting).

    © Copyright 2006 Jaryth F. P a g e | 3


    Now, to set up the Materials for the lighting.
    Create a new Material. Name it Visible. Turn off all of the channels except Luminance. After that, go
    to luminance, and apply the „kitchen_probe_con.hdr‟ as the texture. As you can see, it‟s a bit bright,
    so we are going to tone it down a bit. We can do this by setting the Brightness to 0%, and set the Mix
    to 50%. Then it should look like this:

    Now duplicate this material, and name


    the duplicate GI. The only change we
    are going to make to this one is setting
    the MIP Blur Offset in the Luminance
    Channel, to 10%. By doing this, it evens
    out the light, so when its rendered it will
    not look as blotchy.

    Now, apply the GI material to the GI


    sphere, and the Visible material to the
    Visible Sphere.

    Now we have to tell witch sphere what to do. So right click on the Visible Sphere in the Object
    browser, and go to Cinema 4D tags, and Compositing. Click on the tag. Make sure only the following
    are checked:
    Seen by Camera
    Seen by Rays
    Seen by Transparency
    Seen by Reflection

    Once that‟s done, add Compositing tag to the GI sphere, and make sure only the Seen by GI is
    checked.

    Now, after all of that complicated work, your Object Browser should
    look like this. (if not then you messed up).

    The final thing to do, is to move the camera into what looks like a
    good position.

    (If you want a precise location, create a camera object (Objects > Scene > Camera) and entre the
    following values:

    Position: X: 150.142 m Y: 124.184 m Z: -451.344 m


    Rotation: H: 18.4 ° P: -15.6 ° B: 0 °

    and that will give you the exact camera angle I used)

    © Copyright 2006 Jaryth F. P a g e | 4


    Rendering
    If you tried to render it now, well it would look like a normal every day render. But that‟s not what we
    want, we are going for Photorealism. So for that we are going to need some Global Illumination.
    So lets open up the Render Settings, and go to the Global Illumination tab (Note: On the older
    versions of Cinema 4D it was called Radiosity) and turn it on. Now, you could spend a half hour
    messing with the settings, tweaking them to get them just right… OR you could use these:

    Once that‟s all sorted out, click on Options, and make sure you turn off Auto Light. If you don‟t, your
    scene will looked all messed up.
    And now for the usual end stuff.
    Click on Antaliasing, and change it to Best. Click on Output, and change the Size to 800x600. Go to
    Save, and pick a path to a safe place, and change the format to JPEG.

    So… hit render. See how it looks. And that‟s about it.

    © Copyright 2006 Jaryth F. P a g e | 5

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