Mash

Here you go, give this a go. Using one area light for the illumination but splitting off the shadows.

If there's one video I can make which will save you more time working than it takes to watch, it's a video about takes. So here's a video about takes.

New video up for everyone, how to do sculpting in C4D.

C4D frozen? crashed? lost all your work? Maybe not!

True but it gets tricky with spotlights. If you plan to model the housing unit and geometry of the light fitting then this is a good choice, but in many cases the lights in large arenas never truly get modelling, there are just a number of lights up in the ceiling casting generic light downwards. Sometimes I will swap this out with one giant area light, but then you lose all sense of having it be a series of spots casting detailed crisp shadows, all the shadowing turns into a giant blur when you end up having to use area shadows. One option I have toyed with is using one giant area light up above, then using a parallel light with hard shadows but as a shadow caster light. I'll give this a play and see if I can get any decent results.

I had quite a few people telling me they used one of my old videos where I showed some of the best settings to change in C4D, so I figured I would do an update for R19. In this one I cover what preferences you can change to prevent c4d from locking up your machine whilst rendering, project settings which make working on smaller scenes easier (yay, no more 2 metre wide cubes!) and how to clean some of the fluff out of the tool bars.

Naturally there will be exceptions, but a few observations: They have picked the slowest GI method as their base standard. Double QMC is pretty much the slowest of all GI methods. This isn't something I would suggest for most people I don't see at any point if they show the render settings options page. If this is a single reflection depth, then they are essentially comparing QMC+QMC against just single QMC. Maybe. This scene has no light sources, the render times would change quite a bit if it weren't simply a hdri sky for all of the illumination. Its an outdoor scene. Reflectance materials work ok so long as the light rays can bounce off the model and escape. If you have an indoor scene with light bouncing back and forth, diffuse reflectance can get quite nasty.

I had someone recently ask me a few questions about lighting up mograph clone materials, so I figured I may as well make a video. Hope this helps some people.

Keeping or removing the legacy specular layer makes no real difference to render times, when you add a Beckman/ggx layer, these still incorporate specular as part of the reflection. Specular does have uses, but if you are going to the lengths of adding real reflections and using roughness to soften them, at this point imho you may as well go all the way and dump specular completely. Spec is just a fake reflection of a light source, you may as well just add a real reflection and make a real object for the reflection to use. It certainly doesn't justify the render times. re: turn off color and just use a diffuse reflection; I can't agree here. This increases render times dramatically. Unfortunately neither physical nor standard render are that well geared to doing diffuse lighting with reflectance. I've done quite a few tests and generally sticking with the older color channel + gi lowers render times by an order of magnitude. For the scene which prompted this video, I get render times of 20 minutes with GI but no specular. 1 hour with GI and specular, but then if I switch to a reflectance based diffuse system my render times exceed 10 hours even with just 2 reflection bounces. 3+ reflection bounces gives absurd render times.

Time for something new, cut your render times in half with a click

Just a quick request for people to make their preferences known, im running a quick poll to see what render engine people are using the most: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=1491548 And then obviously come back over here to the cool forum ;-)