Interior Radiosity

[Wokka]

G'day,

I've been having trouble with internals using radiosity (isn't everyone??) and decided to do a quick search for any good examples of C4D, internal architectural images of contemporary design. Unfortunatley I haven't been able to find many on this forum/gallery or the Maxon website.

I don't know if it's due to a smaller user base with C4D or the difficulty in using radiosity in scenes that have both large flat surfaces (floors and ceilings) and small details areas (frames, furniture etc). I always have a huge juggle trying to get a reasonable result in a reasonable time (less than 8 hours) without too much PS work. Iv'e attached a couple of images showing one that worked and one that didn't and was eventually faked after days of dissapointment.

Can anyone show me some good consistant results to keep my enthusiasm high? I've just landed a few good internals and VR's and would love to get some great results for my portfolio.

Most tutorials I've read either involve generic model viewing or are not suited to contemporary design. By the way, I'm only R7.3 and just had to upgrade the PC before I go to 8.5.

Any links, images etc would be great! Anyone.....anyone.........

[STRAT]

that first image looks great, but as you say, how long did it take to render?

 

i find lighting an internal scene as easy (or hard) as lighting an external scene.

main differnece being is that a fair bit of extra infill lighting is needed as the image based lighting using the sky object obviously has less effect.

 

The main advice i can offer for internals is the diffuse depth - unless absolutely nessessary dont go above 1. 99% of other c4d users will tell you otherwise, but i've managed to work it at a level of 1 for 99% of my internal renders. a diff depth of 1 saves an absolute shed load of render time.

but to compensate for the lack of bounced light with a dd of 1 you'll need to insert a few low light emmitting omni lights to act as infills.

This is kind of cheating if you like, but certainly gets the job done, and much faster. and, imho, does not take away from the depth and richness of extra proper gi bounces.

 

Also look at the prepass size. i almost allways use a prepass size of 1/3 and up the stoch samples to compensate, but where you have large open flat surfaces a prepass size of 1/1 is essential.

 

Also, another super time waster are reflections. C4d has a wonderfully fast raytracer, but when reflections are liberally used in conjunction with radiosity the rendering can be sluggish. you need to optomise the AA settings using either render tags or you can render out to a psd file and layer you reflections that way.

 

The scenes below are lit with 1 overall skylight for the main IBL, 1 overall spot light acting as the sun to get my main shadows, a few infill omnis in the shop units to illuminate them more than the mall itself, and about 8 or nine infill omnis in the mall itself.

All these omnis are attenuated, have soft shadows set to about 25%, and are lit to about 5-10%.

 

These examples of a shopping mall i rendered a few years ago are from when i first started using c4d. these were rendered on an AMD xp1900 pc using R7.3, diffuse depth to 1 and gi accuracy set to 99%, all in around 1-2 hours each. pretty good render times for a pretty slow pc in today's terms.

obviously they need more gi samples in places, but for the deadline at the time we were pretty happy with them.

 

just experiment and try out different methods. also look in the c4d forums here in cga. i've written reams of render speed tips before now

 

hope this helps.

[Gerri4D]

Hi, this is my last interior test.

Done in Allplan---> Cinema4D 8.5+Advance Render

1 Sky

1 Sun Light

Render Time at 2048*1536, 3.30 h on AMD 2400+

Radiosity on

I submited this image at Maxon, and waiting....

[Gerri4D]

The render settings:

 

P.S. Sorry for my english.

Gerri

[Wokka]

Thanks Guy's, I appreciate your reply's. Nice images to keep inspiring me.

Strat, I have certainly been following your various tips regarding render speed and apply them whenever possible. I certainly stick to diff depth of 1, my machine grinds at any more. It's hard to do an architectural model without reflections but your tip to rendr out a psd is handy and I'll give it a go. I've actually been rendering out a multipass with shadows, radiosity and also object buffer so when a rendering has too many blotches on the large flat surfaces, I can then easily select the material in PS and add a bit of blur etc to soften the effect.

Is there a significant increase in speed with 8.5? I tried the demo of 8 but had no improvement at all.

 

Cheers.

[STRAT]

significant, but not drastic.

altho, when i updated from r7.3 to 8.1 i updated my pc at the same time, so i couldnt really comment

 

whichever tho, the upgrade from 7.3 to 8.x is a must i'd say, and good value for money too.