Cinema 4D Lighting Study
Testing lighting to improve renders in Cinema 4D and Redshift
I started the project to get more experience with lighting inside of Cinema 4D using the Redshift renderer. I talk about lighting at the end, but this entry is mostly to document my process.
This project was created so I can practice lighting it because in another practice project that I started I could not light the scene properly. Since I was not happy with the lighting on the last project, I felt the need to focus on just lighting on this project. My biggest issue with that project was the lack of shadows. After researching, I realized that the bad shadows came from the bad lighting setup I had. Looking back at the that project, I had multiple lights placed all over the place. So for this render I wanted to focus on a small amount of lights coming from one direction.
The Process
Before I played with the lighting, I needed a composition to light. So, I created a quick composition using simple shapes.
I started with the cluster of boxes shown below.
The boxes didn’t seem too interesting so I decided to add a sphere. The sphere would be the center point that the eye focus on.
For the lighting study, I wanted to have something that casts a shadow on the sides. So, I added one wall on each side to keep the composition symmetrical so that you still focus on the center.
This set up felt really chunky and closed off. Another issue is that I wanted the light to come from the side, and with these solid walls, harsh shadows will be casted on the focus element. So, I decided to break the wall up and have several thin columns spanning the length of the wall. To get this effect, I put a tall thin cube inside of a cloner object and increased the clone amount so that it spanned the distance that I was looking for.
Now that the center, and peripherals were created, I needed to think about the foreground and background. For the foreground I saw this image on online and I really liked it.
I watched some tutorials and I figured out how it was created. This effect was done by using a plane object and having it effected by dynamics. Objects are dropped on the plane and the waves were created. I did not want to learn dynamics on this one because I wanted to focus on the lighting. But, I will try out dynamics on the next project.
So to do this an easier way, I created a plane and had it effected by a displacer with a noise shader. The noise shader creates the wave like forms. Within that shaded layer, the movement comes from changing the values in the movement settings in the layer properties. You will see the movement in the animation.
Foreground is complete, the peripherals are created, now I needed to think about the background. Again I wanted to keep it simple with basic shapes. I felt it necessary that the horizontal shape on the center piece had something to connect to so I placed a wall like structure behind everything.
This massive wall lacked visual interest and opportunity for light to cast unique shadows. So to breakup the wall I used capsule object and placed it into a cloner and repeated it four times. Then, I took that cloner with the four capsules and placed it, and the new wall, into a boule object to cut the holes into the wall.
Now, I had a pretty cool looking wall.
At this point, I think I had an issue with being able to see completely through these holes with nothing in the distance. So I decide to make this a corridor. Having two walls that are identical about 5 feet apart. It may seem like the wall that was further away is smaller, but the walls are the exact same size, and the perspective is creating the effect of the position and size shift.
I still wasn’t happy with the negative space in the background on the top. So I used large walls to break up the space.
The Lighting
Now that all of the objects are placed, and the composition looked good. I wanted to start with the lighting. Like I said before, I recently created a render and the render did not look good because the lighting was bad. So I made sure that the lighting I did on this one was nothing like the other.
The biggest mistake I made on the other one, is having multiple huge light sources. Huge light sources are not always bad, but I wanted to have hard shadows. The shadows I had were soft and in some places none existent.
What I have learned.
The bigger the light casting the shadow, the softer the shadow will be. So I needed to make sure that my main light on camera right was a relatively small light.
If I want harder shadows, I have to create smaller lights.
With this main light in place, I liked how the shadow is being cast. Now, I needed to figure out how to make everything else more visible and less dark. The easiest way to add overall even light for beginners is to use a dome light. Some people may use a single dome light to light their entire piece. I actually used a dome light in the first set of images so I could get a rough idea of how the shapes would look when the lights were added. I used the dome light as a fill light. The light helped me create ambient light so everything can be visible.
Since I liked how the dome light was adding light to everything evenly, I added another light on the right side. The new light was slightly larger. I placed the light lower than the main light. It was lower in power and closer to the camera than the main light. This second light was used to light the front more.
Everything looked cool. The shadow was a bit too sharp, so I duplicated the main light and placed it slightly under the main light. This placement created a double line shadow effect. These lights together softened the original shadow. Now that I had twice the amount of lights, I used about half the power of each light to keep it at the same exposure.
The Texturing
Next, I wanted to address the texturing. Now, that the lighting was where I wanted it. I needed to color these shapes to add more visual interest.
This still looks really cool. I added all of the animations to this so that it stands out on instagram. This process was long. I ended up adding and changing a lot of stuff to get it to transition from light to dark. Also, this blog post is too long, so I wont bore you with the rest of the process. Check out the final render below.
The Renders
Hope you like it!
