[Cinema4D] Making your scene even more realistic

[dadofender]

What up guys, this is David.
As far as I can see, there are not so many Cinema4D tutorials, so..

Let's start.

Today we'll be making our scene, more realistic than we usually do, this way:

First of all, create a new project (I'll resize my C4D window just to take some better screens), and let's set up our Render Setup.

On General leave everything at default.
On Output, choose your resolution, 4:3 or 16:9, I usually do 1280x720 for widescreen, or 1440x1080 for 4:3. The frame range depends on your pourposes, leave as "Current Image" if you're doing a static image, choose "All Frames" if you're going to render a full animation.
On Save just choose your save path, the format, and the alpha channel (The alpha channel makes your background transparent instead of default black).
On Multi-Pass leave everything at default.
On Anti Aliasing, leave it on default, if you want a faster render, it affects reflections and refractions, so for a better quality, instead of "Geometry" select "Best" and make it from 1x1 to 2x2, selecting 16x16 doesn't make that difference...
On Options leave everything at default.

I'm gonna make it widescreen.

Second, once we had setup everything, start placing a floor, and leave it with his default color.. We don't need to colorize everything actually.


Now if you render it, you can see the floor, and it's color, all uniform.

Actually, i'll start creating a text, so go to MoGraph, and select MoText.


I'll type in "Dadofender", and choose a nice font.
Maybe I'll need to resize it a bit, because the font I'm using is way too large, so select the same tool I've selected and resize it a bit of necessary.


Now on your lower right corner, change your attributes, I'm changing the depth on "Object" and i'm filling caps, caps smooths your things, if you like caps, do like me.


and you get this, or something like this..


And if you render it, it should look like this:



By the way, the button for quick render an image, is this one:


As you can see, the text seems not to be placed on a floor...It looks like floating on a blue-greysh atmosphere..

There's a simple trick, actually there are tons of tricks, this is one of the easiest.

Ambient Occlusion

Ambient occlusion, creates some small and soft shadows, making your scene really interesting. Check it out.

Open again your render settings, and click on "Effects"
Then select "Ambient occlusion" and close render settings.

Render again your scene, and this will be the difference (I zoomed in a bit):


This is so nice, but i'm gonna warn you... This is a really simple scene, the render is really fast, but if you're going to render a scene with reflections, lights, refractions, rooms, or environments, Ambient occlusion might take you some more time to render, as it's a pretty heavy particular.

Ok then, This is realistic, BUT, there's another way to make our scene even MORE realistic. Using Global Illumination.

Like you did for activating Ambient occlusion, do the same to activate Global illumination, on Effects/GlobalIllumination.

I'll explain..

By default, the scene has a light, with unknown position and strenght. Otherwise for every new project, we had to set up a light manually.

By activating GI (Global illumination) we cut off that light, giving to an object, the property of lighting.

Example:


That White Rectange, will be our lamp, and if you check on the material layout, there's the material which gives the light property.

To create a light material, just do exactly what I did:


So yea, create a new material, uncheck all boxes, except Luminance. Play with "Brighness" and get your favourite luminance on your scene.

Render it, and see what happens!



Haha, don't worrie about this shitty thing, the global illumination is working, and it's lighting all the points, just wait a bit and get this:


Well, those are only a few hints, to make your animation or whatever a bit more realistic.


It's 01:00 AM and I'll post some nice tutorials about modeling, creating materials, making a nice sky for nice reflections, using refractions, depth of field, playing with cameras, how to animate them, compositing tags, and many other things


See you soon in the next tut!

[Faux]

I really like your work. Good job man.