Lighting La Salle Chapter 2: Broad Daylight

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Introduction

Hello and welcome to the second part of the Indoor Lighting series.

The features used here are part of the Advanced Render in Cinema 4D 11.5. Some elements could possibly be reproduced in earlier versions of C4D, but in the earlier releases of Cinema 4D the Global Illumination feature is founded on completely different algorithms. So the results and settings might not work out exactly the same.

On a technical point, the memory footprints when rendering this scene might be quiet big so the usage of a 64 bit OS is recommended. The render performance is strongly dependent on the power of your hardware, so give yourself some time for rendering the final results. So let's start.

Render Settings

For the final rendering I used a width of 1600 pixels. This gives us good definition of the small details which are part of this scene. The anti-aliasing is set to Best. For the work in progress images you can also use None or Geometry. Using the Multipass option for the final render might give you the opportunity to get the best result for your final image.
When we experience broad daylight we witness a quiet neutral color tone produced by the Sun. The Sun is settled at a high altitude, almost in direct opposition to the camera. In contrast to the first part of the series (sunrise) the influence of the light works in a less direct way - this is because of the position of the Sun. The amount of indirectly illuminated areas is much higher than at sunrise, as the Sun cannot get through the windows directly.

For the lighting setup I'm using conventional light sources and Global Illumination, which is going to play an important role here. So let's have a look at the structure of the setup.

Sunlight

I have one light source which I call "Sunlight". When looking at the editor screen it appears that this light source might not produce any effect at all, but in combination with the Global Illumination we get the effect we require. It is very strong with a slight yellowish color and the contrast is quite high. Whilst making this tutorial I tried the light in different positions to reflect different sources. To do that in an easy way I used a target tag focused on a separate light target (Fig.01 - 03).

Fig. 01

Fig. 01

Fig. 02

Fig. 02

Fig. 03 id_Fig.

Fig. 03 id_Fig.

Secondary Lights

The secondary light gives us the ability to have more light in the area you can see in the editor shot. If we were to only use the primary sunlight, we would have to increase the sample levels much higher. This would have a negative effect on the performance later on, so this is a quite handy and effective work around.

If you watch the editor shots of the four lights very closely you might only see a small effect, but don't worry about that. When they are combined with Global Illumination they will work in the way we want them to. In reality the whole sky works as a kind of huge light source. You, of course, have the main direction of the sun, but at the same time you also have light from an infinite amount of directions reflected from the landscape and other objects outside of the windows. These are the four secondary lights that I set up (Fig.04 - 11).

Fig. 04

Fig. 04

Fig. 05

Fig. 05

Fig. 06

Fig. 06

Fig. 07

Fig. 07

Fig. 08

Fig. 08

Fig. 09

Fig. 09

Fig. 10

Fig. 10

Fig. 11

Fig. 11

The combination of the sunlight and the four secondary lights might now look like this... not very impressive (Fig.12).

Fig. 12

Fig. 12

Effect Lights

In order to get more definition on certain objects I used two other light sources which I called "Effect 1" and "Effect 2". Again exclusions do a good job here. These two lights are not used for general illumination, but for making some "hotspots" on the surfaces of the objects inside the room. They define specularity and reflections in a more intensive way. The three dimensional appearance of the scene is increased and it looks less boring (Fig.13 - 16).

Fig. 13

Fig. 13

Fig. 14

Fig. 14

Fig. 15

Fig. 15

Fig. 16

Fig. 16

Now it is time to have a look what we have so far (Fig.17)

Fig. 17

Fig. 17

Reflectors

As we want to use GI here we can define the objects which I called "reflectors". I placed two next to the windows outside and one inside the room. This helps to simulate the light bounced from the walls. In Advanced Render 3 this kind of object with a luminance material can be defined as a light source. They produce a very smooth light. Using compositing tags prevents them from dropping shadows themselves, which we do not want in this case. So the shadow dropping of the other lights is not influenced. You can find these items in the scene file.

Global illumination

Now it is time to get the rest of the illumination by GI.

To achieve the desired effect I used a diffuse depth of two with a primary intensity of 150% and a secondary of 75%. The final quality settings are at a higher level in order to prevent any artifacts on the smooth surfaces of the walls. For a quicker preview you can set them to preview level. The render using these parameters shows that we have a large amount of artefacts, but it is a handy feature to get an impression of the final render (Fig.18).

Fig. 18

Fig. 18

In Fig.19 you can see the final settings for the global illumination parameters. The render of the GI-pass without any additional light sources shows how big the influence of the global illumination is. All the light in this image is coming from the HDRI which is used to get nice reflections on the surfaces.

Fig. 19

Fig. 19

Final Rendering

The final image was edited in Photoshop for a quick fine tuning. The multipass option delivers channels like the depth channel and the reflection pass separately, but there are a lot of options to create a satisfying result.

As I said before it takes some time to get a good render. So the best thing to do is to leave your computer working over night, but for serious render fans this is a usual. If you experience problems with the performance of your machine you can try to lower the resolution of the render or reduce the quality settings for the GI (Fig.20).

Fig. 20

Fig. 20

So have fun and good bye for now, Fredi.

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