setting good light levels for lights vs. sunlight

[Ernest Burden III]

Ernest,

The boys!

They are 4 and 1 and they are our life.

 

Same here with my two boys, 9 and 3. The best thing that ever happened to me, having these children.

 

I feel we need a daughter to fill our the family, but my wife isn't cooperating. What's her problem? All she has to do is carry a baby for most of a year, go through a birth, feeding...

[Fran]

Ernest,

 

I'll let you in on a little secret. You see, once mothers get a child past the age of 3 in one piece, we can almost feel like we can keep him safe at least to the teenage-try-drinking-beer-and-driving stage. Lucky me, I get to start all over again with all the choking hazards (mini-legos) that come along with having a 6-year-old brother.

[Ernest Burden III]

I'll let you in on a little secret. You see, once mothers get a child past the age of 3 in one piece, we can almost feel like we can keep him safe at least to the teenage...stage.

 

Well, I've had a boy for 9 years and not one emergency-room visit. I'm the neighborhood child-safety-nazi. This comes from my surviving being a boy child without the benefit of adult supervision. By 9 I had been hit by a truck, attacked by a dog, fallen off a house I had climbed up and too many other dangerous things to mention. I do my best to actually take care of my children. Not that most people don't, it's just my parents that didn't.

 

Lucky me, I get to start all over again with all the choking hazards (mini-legos) that come along with having a 6-year-old brother.

 

Can you elaborate? Do you have a new, little one? A cake in the oven, perhaps?

[Fran]

Can you elaborate? Do you have a new, little one? A cake in the oven, perhaps?

 

Well, it looks more like Jiffy Pop. We have a son due the last week in August.

[Ernest Burden III]

Ernest

How many tree types do you have in the image?

 

OK, back to the issue at hand--my project:

 

I have many, many trees. Many of them. Lots.

 

These are fairly final WIPs of two of the three views, rendered in Cinema in several passes, several multi-layer files. I'm really liking the multi-layer PSD output. It gives me all I need to dominate the renderings in Photoshop, bend them to my will.

[Ernest Burden III]

Well, it looks more like Jiffy Pop. We have a son due the last week in August.

 

Can you still buy JiffyPop? I guess it would be you that will look like the ever-expanding foil wonder. Congratulations! That's really heartwarming! So that's two boys for us both? Where are the daughters, I ask you, where? Well, my neighbor has three girls. I guess I live on the boy-child side of the street.

[LunaCyborg]

I have to admit that you are half right and wrong about the speed issue in C4D, compared to 3dsmax which is as slow like a crawl. If you want to use radiosity for archi-rendering just have to mess with the settings like the one I use:

Strenght: 100

Accuracy: 70

Prepass/size: 1/1

Difuse depth: 3

Stochastic sample:10

Min. Resolution:3

Max resolution:10

1gb of DDR memory

Athlon 2400+

Light with ambien illumination and fallof: Linear and some omnis with small shadow maps for fill and brightness set to 20-30 in some cases

[STRAT]

that'll sure render uber fast Luna, but with those low settings you may as well switch GI off, you'll hardly see it's effect

[Ernest Burden III]

that'll sure render uber fast Luna, but with those low settings you may as well switch GI off, you'll hardly see it's effect

 

Which of his settings (being low) will cause the GI to 'barely be visible'?

 

Put another way, which settings have the most effect on good, visible, GI?

 

 

Oh, and in an ironic manner, I am hoping to get my C4D rendering network set up, just as soon as I run out of all work, next week. Getting my head into the web-address thing to set it up was too much to do with a lot of work on my plate, so I'll do it in downtime. I haven't had any of that since a year-ago March. Before that I had several months of downtime--ouch!

[LunaCyborg]

If you want to make it stronger but still fast raise the strenght to 200 or more, you will see it

[STRAT]

If you want to make it stronger but still fast raise the strenght to 200 or more, you will see it

nope. that certainly wont do it. that'll only drastically over expose it

 

the first thing to realise is that ALL scenes are different, and different settings are needed. you cant standardise things or state certain general settings. the settings will be scene specific.

 

to answer ur question Ernest, luna's settings are -

 

Strenght: 100

Accuracy: 70

Prepass/size: 1/1

Difuse depth: 3

Stochastic sample:10

Min. Resolution:3

Max resolution:10

 

this'll certainly indicate general light bouncing levels and radiosity levels, but it definately wont do much for the GI effect.

 

the strength is fine at 100, so is the prepass size and diffuse depth.

but gi is constructed of samples. weather you have low accuracy and high samples, or high accuracy and lower samples the method still requires substantially more samples than what luna states.

 

with an accuracy set to an average of 70% and low samples as above, you'll get massive horrible artifacts all over the image. the way to solve this is to either up the stoch samples to a couple of hundred, or up the min samples up to a 1000+ or so. usually you'd up the stoch and min/max samples together to get best gi/render speed solution.

 

you can always set the accuracy down to 40 or lower, but again, massive stoch and min samps are needed (1000+ sometimes) to compensate for lack of accuracy settings. this can take some time to render.

 

i personally use high accuracy settings (ie, 90+) and lower samples. typically for a day time external i might use -

 

strength: 100

accuracy: 95

Prepass/size: 1/1

Difuse depth: 1 (with a fill in omni or 2 to compensate and render faster)

Stochastic sample:200

Min. Resolution:20

Max resolution:100

 

(again, scene specific)

 

the max res will only add extra samples where elements meet or join, so in architecture this is usually a pretty big factor.

 

which ever way you do it, you must have a fair wack of stoch samples involved. these are most important. at high accuracy settings, the min samples i might leave in the regions of 20-40.

 

if, unlike me, you dont have break-neck speed rendering facilities , then i'd stick with a 70 or 80% accuracy, but make sure the stoch and max samples are fairly high into the hundreds.

[Ernest Burden III]

if, unlike me, you dont have break-neck speed rendering facilities , then i'd stick with a 70 or 80% accuracy, but make sure the stoch and max samples are fairly high into the hundreds.

 

No, I use poor old Athlons.

 

I also LIKE the stochastic noise, so I tend to prefer numbers like 32 for that, but it's a look.

[STRAT]

you're using stotchastic mode i pressume for ur stotchastic look?

 

(if so then my above schpeil only applies to normal gi mode) (but you know that )

[tomankubik]

one advic when you are useing very low number of min resolution, Cinema will add some more bounces in there and this will take time, its hard to say what is the good number but mine is around 20-40 you can test in on the scene how is min. resolution working and you will see

[LunaCyborg]

To expertise the use of lights in cinema 4d the best tutorials and images i have found are the one in: http://www.3dluvr.com/carles

 

I did some test render of one of the project that were giving me some headache and these are the results