Cinema4D R11 Just popped out and I've been trying to render a nice smooth animation lit completely by an image. Lighting by an image is a true test of a GI engine as it requires great precision, when you have interpolation like with Irradience you tend to get bad glitches and shadows that don't quite fit the corners of objects. Fortunately we have BruteForce and QMC which give the nice noisy versus blurry effect such as you might get with unbiased renderers like Maxwell.

So to summarize what I learned, use Irradience for most cases when dealing with large undetailed flat areas, but if you get problems with glitches and shadows not being sharp enough/meeting edges then switch to BruteForce

And remember that rendering 5x the size with Irradience will render at the same speed if you cache the GI, Brute Force however will take much much longer making it hard to justify for Print resolution work.

This render I did took all night but It's pretty good (the visible stepping is from compression):

Oooh ooh, I just found something, I thought this was coming in a future version but It's included and working right now! why did no one tell me!
You can use an image to power an area light:

1:17 Area Light (20) + Low GI + DMC AA 4


5:39 Brute Force (40) + Light Cache (1000) + DMC AA 4



2:53 Vray BruteForce


3:00 Vray Irradience


Vray Irradience

Vray's BruteForce isn't always better here It's over 4x times slower and visibly noisy so to get a smooth result would probably take twice as long again.
Even so, you can see the corners on the cube are sharper, but It's just not important here.
Also BruteForce solutions can't be saved and re-used. This is especially useful when rendering at very large sizes for print.


Vray BruteForce


Vray Irradience - Rubbish but fast


Vray Irradience - Nicer but slow


Vray BruteForce - Spangly but even slower

I'm revisiting a bunch of old render I did years ago to use my new found skills, computer and rendering engine to make them sexy again by modern standards (I hope)


Versus the Old:

Finally got round to exploring the world of studio lighting, and the results I'm really pleased with. Basically modeled all the lights and background, The model is by someone else with some tweak by me. He'd asked me if I could help him make his render more realistic, about... 3 years ago? finally got round to it

:-P

And slap on some fancy post effects:




Some Early renders:



Note this one has very visible thickness in the sides of the bottle, in reality refraction joins the surface of the plastic and water together, I had to tweak/overlap the water model inside to achieve the end result.

Playing about with Vray and Mograph


And other tests

It's art!

Been working on a little something today, I didn't do the modeling, I've just handled the materials, lighting and rendering.

And heres a close up:



Needs more saturation/color in it, the radiator looks kinda odd being too shiny and the Chrome metal is a bit grey in parts and has some not so great reflections.



This job highlighted Vray for C4D's current missing features though

No distributed bucket rendering
No support for material selection tags
No glow post effects, but.. they are naff anyway, that's what we have photoshop for
No support for exluding objects from shadows
No support for independent reflections per material, just needs a environment map projection type shader to put that effect in any channel you wish.
No blending of multiple materials
No support for proximal shader, so shader that based on distance from another object
No volumetric light support
Seemingly broken diffusion, that results in visible squares around buckets with high glossiness as seen below. I couldn't find a way to fix that.




... It's still better than Cinemas renderer though

:-D

And I know the next versions fixes a bunch of the above