(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Hey guys, i haven't seen a lot of graphic tutorials so i thought I'd post one on an important part of 3D design, lighting!


so to get started open up your cinema 4d and start a new project, here are some render settings that i use to help give your picture detail and a better all around look, you can explore these settings yourselves or just copy mine, we will add more later.
i am using Cinema4d R15, and before i start this tut i am assuming those reading this have no idea how to use cinema 4d so these will be 100% beginner tips.

what we will be making
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Render settings:

start by opening your render settings, it will be the third little option with the movie cut scene icon (see pic 1)

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next we need to set the size of our render composition, you can do so by selecting from the drop down list or typing in the exact dimensions, i will select 1920 X 1080, and current frames, everything else can be left to default. (pic 2)



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under our save settings we will select where to save our render, what type of file to save as ( i use png for my intro's as well as pictures, we will cover why i do this in future tutorials., we also want to select alpha channel, that way when you render you dont end up with a picture with a black background. (pic 3)


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now right click in the empty area to the left and select ambient occlusion, global illumination, and i selected glow but keep in mind you dont need to do this unless you plan on using the glow feature on a material, and even then it will be added automatically. also keep these unchecked for now, they will slow your render down a lot, we will activate them again before our final render, so just leave unchecked for now. pic 4 and pic 5

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and that will conclude our render settings for now, lets get started!




Setup:



so lets go ahead and drop in some motext, to select a motext hit mograph on the top of your program and select motext from the drop down list. pic 6

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we will set the depth to around 80 and set the alignment to middle, also i will change my text to GFX and my font to Ariel Black. note: the more fonts you have, the longer it takes c4d to open your font selection the first time it opens. pic 7


pic 7 [img]https://i.imgur.com/QUDSuDK.png [/img]

now get your lettering in a position you like, avoid straight on looks as this lacks any uniqueness and looks rather bland, also test this way is hard to cast shadows off of. pic 8

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good/bad examples:

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now in your viewport (the window where you can see your text) you will notice there is a light grey border on the sides of your picture, this is the guide line, anything on the outside of this will not show up in your render. pic 9



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so lets fix this where we will not be confused by it, to do this hover your mouse anywhere in the right attributes area and hold hift and press V on your keyboard, then click on the view tap and find where it says opacity and change it too 100, that outside border should now be a solid black, see pic 10 and 11

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ok lets move onto the next step!



Materials:


ok so lets first create our lighting material, i dont usually use too many prelight setups, i like making my own although i use spot lights quite often, anyways hit create in the material section on c4d and at the top select new material, then double click on the material to open its properties. pic 12

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first we will create our lighting material, its very simple, just uncheck color and specular and check luminance. pic13


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next we will make a basic reflective material, select reflection and change its brightness to around 40-50 percent, or whatever you feel is right. then under the specular tab change the weight, height and falloff. pic 14


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now that we have this base down we can create a couple more materials with the same settings by holding down ctrl and dragging the material out of the one we just created like so

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after that just adjust the color option on each one to make some different colored materials, you should end up with something like this. pic 15


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now lets get started with our lighting!



Lighting:


ok so first thing we want to do is create a plane, so hold the mouse button down on the object tab and then select PLANE

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under the plane object tab i will set the width to 200, height to 600, and the segments to 1 on both width and height.

[img] https://gyazo.com/85dbdfaf0e46c458d79741031058b8ae.png[/img]

next create a motext cloner and drop the plane into the cloner , the plane must be a child of the cloner, and the cloner a parent of the plane for it to work.

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change the cloner count to 8, set the p.y value to 0 (default is 50) and change the p.x to around 300, ( that default is 0)

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front the top view you should now have something like this

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now you can apply the bright lighting material we created to the cloner and drag it up in the y position so it is out of our view (dont drag it so high it has no effect on our scene though)

now lets create another plane, this time we will make it bigger, i will make it 1200 x 1200 with again, 1 segment for the height and 1 segment for the width. we can just leave this one where it stands, it can act as a floor. now the reason i use a plane for the floor instead of an actual floor object is there is much more control with the plane and it has no normals so you do no need to reverse normals to apply material to it.

now we will copy that plane and set its axis orientation to +X, after that go to the coordinance and set the p.x to -600, (this will put our plane right on the edge of our floor plane. since the floor plane is 1200 and -600 is half of 1200 in the -x axis.

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you should now have something like this, (the left wall)

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we will again copy the floor plane, only this time set its orientation to +z and the p.z coords. to 600, now we should have our back wall like so

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copy the last plane you just made, (the back wall), and set the p.z to -300 and the rotation height (r.h for short to -25)
now some of these next settings wil be different for you guys than they were for me just depending in your text, size, position ect. but what you want to do is slightly raise this plane off the floor so i will put my r.b to -10 and my p.y to 695 cm so that just the tip of my plane is touching the ground and the rest is in an upward angle,

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you want it to look something like this

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the reason for this is a slight light going across the face of your text, like below (dont worry about seeing the plane, i will show you how to hide it later.

[img]https://gyazo.com/01840f50fee9a2cbf5da9a16529db20d.png [/img]


now we are going to bring in a spot light, lets try to position this right above and to the left front of our first letter., to do so we can change our viewport by clicking here then selecting the top view

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next click the light icon and select spot light, then click your rotate tool and while rotating in the z axis hold shift and it will rotate in increments of ten until its in the -45 position (facing downward) then move it up the the y position so it looks something like this

[img]https://gyazo.com/aa9f40fd9ed8bfa4e8469256d6647b12.png[img]


next copy the spot light we just created and move it along the x axis until it reaches the other side of your text, now you should have 2 setup like this.

[img]https://gyazo.com/a8b50e7f66906903ef8c76887fac1321.png[img]

now lets adjust how the spotlights effect our scene, select both lights by selecting one, then holding ctrl and selecting the other until both are highlighted, here you can select the intensity, i will select 80% on mine, and i will set one light to a soft yellow and the other a soft teal. you should look something like this

[url]https://gyazo.com/4d4f63a5146fa7f2e177fccb013ac420[/url]

now i will drop a few shapes in just for reflection purposes (this tutorials purpose is basically to show you how to go about creating a lightroom, you can adjust whatever you like or dont like)

[img]https://gyazo.com/68aafdb05658afee7522bfac1114780c.png[/img]

now to hide the planes or lights so they are not in your render you need to group the objects together by highlighting your selected elements and then clicking alt+g, once they are grouped you can right click, go to cinema4d tags, compositing, and uncheck seen by camera.

[img] [url]https://gyazo.com/6f445e224f52ef481a821da354d43123.gif[/url] [/img]


last but not least go back into your render options and check global illumination and ambient occlusion, you can also add the sharpen filter effect but i would leave it below 60% or it will cause some aliasing.

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now render out your final and see how it looks! (i chose to change my text before the final render which is the post pic)


NOTE:There are many things that can be done to improve this light room still, this was more a guide to doing your own for those who dont know where to start. i hope you guys learned something and let me know if you guys would like any other GFX tutorials on anything.



want to download this lightroom to use?
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Great tutorial! I'm sure lots of people will find this very useful. Good job!

Nice detail, Like the shine. I can see you've put a lot of time into this thread nice...

quick tip... your text is floating and reflection is too high

It was just a quick tutorial bro. Wasn't meant to be perfect.. didn't spend that much time on it. Thanks for the input though