cinema 4d

PiNkFlUiD · February 6th, 2003

i would like your opinions about these renderings that i did recently, based on a project. I'm a student architecture and intrested in 3d.... any comment would help..
just to mantion, hello everybody...that's my first post.!!!http://www.cgarchitect.com/forum/fil...realism2_1.jpg
http://www.cgarchitect.com/forum/fil...=todomatio.jpg

nisus · February 6th, 2003

Hi Pinkfluid,

Can you give us some spec too? Software, rendering times, settings?

rgds

nisus

nisus · February 9th, 2003

okay, c4d... but do you got more specs?

nisus

PiNkFlUiD · February 9th, 2003

yes...sorry... I forgot!!
Well this rendering took about 8 hours!! ( the living room), and the other one with the balls took 2.5 min. they both have radiosity

specs GFORCE 2, AMD XP 1700+ and 1GB DDR...The first rendering took so much because of the extreme radiosity settings...i think..
thank you all for your time in advance!!

STRAT · February 9th, 2003

nice renderings (no AA?) but the render speeds are scarey :angeuhoh:

go to the cinema 4d forum here and look at my post for rendering speed tips see if it helps

PiNkFlUiD · February 10th, 2003

Thanks STRAT!! I find your posts very helpfull...
I've just started using radiosity and playing around with the settings...
I think I could have the shame results, with less rendering times. What about the first pic? the one with the balls?
this one took me 3 minutes..(2:48)
with radiosity settings..
strength 100%
accuracy 80%
Pr S 1/2
St. S 300
min 25
max 180

http://www.cgarchitect.com/forum/fil...threeballs.jpg

i also used HDRI for this one.

STRAT · February 10th, 2003

that time for the balls is very fast. wat method did you use to fake the HDRI? just image based lighting with the HDRI map in the ref slot too?

also, try turning down the max settings. max settings is useful where you get alot if intersects and straight edges meeting. the 3 balls on the table woulbn't need any more than a max setting of 25-50. also, the higher the accuracy the lower the stoch samples needed.

wat was the diffuse depth? i normally use 1 or 2 at a push, but rarely higher. 3 or above yeilds massive render times. HDRI particular need no more than 2 diffuse depth maximum usually.

also, watch out where you use MIP and SAT sampling. wrong usage can slow down rendering.
Also try not to use the reflection bluring, it's painfully slow. there are numerous effective work arounds to this.

was the DOF faked in photoshop?

experiment some. nice pics.

PiNkFlUiD · February 10th, 2003

thanks again everybody, well...too many questions ..hmmm....I'll do my best!!!
with these screene captures, i will answer radiosity settings, and rendering time for this new pic, that i did after i tweaked the settings as you said (STRAT)..! have a look !!!

http://www.cgarchitect.com/forum/fil...ttings.jpg.jpg

&

http://www.cgarchitect.com/forum/fil...rendertime.jpg

and the picture is..

http://www.cgarchitect.com/forum/fil...hreeballs2.jpg

as for the hdri, i used SLA shaders for this one, to achieve a better brightness contrast, have a look here on how i did it..(credids to the man who did this tutorial!)

http://www.cartesiuscreations.com/od...als/sadie.html

now, about the DOF, i didn't do it in photoshop, but in c4d itself. I've got version 8, If that makes any difference..

Please tell me what you think of it, and the room..so.. another question..:
I've got 1GB of DDR ram in my box, but cinema only uses little of it..??why? can i make it use more?? what's the deal here? any help in any subject in my life would be appreciated..!!! but if you dont have time, just answer the above..

Paul Griger · February 10th, 2003

Hey PiNkFlUiD

Both renders look nice [the room and spheres] the room has a good natural feel to it I think. The AA as mentioned by Strat should have been turned on, but 8+ hours w/no AA I guess means that some AA on that render would have killed you. And the textures could use some attention, but it seems that were just giving the GI a test drive.

The spheres look fabulous. It’s something that reminds me of a Brazil render or such. I like the HDRI method you posted from mdme_sadie. That’s very interesting. I’ll have to give it a try when I get a chance.

Strat has helped me immensely when I first got C4D XL7. [I’m getting R8 this week ].

Strat, if you don’t mind, I would like to FWD some “Stratology” that you gave to me that I condensed and saved into one file that may be useful for pinky here.

Here are some of my favorite Stratism’s :

his comment about blur is huge. Blur on a material will bring any decent sized scene to a rendering crawl if it has blur in it. Strat also mentions to adjust your materials Illuminations GI and turn it off for black, reflective and transparent items because they don’t add GI to a scene. And if an item needs a boost in GI or less GI, adjust it’s GI receive in the material editor. And the diffuse to 1 should also be heeded if at all possible. If a scene takes 10 minutes with diffuse at 1, a setting of 2 will multiply the render time to 20:00, and diffuse = 3 will give times of close to 30:00. it’s not quite that exponentially exaggerated, but it has some truth to it.

Here’s the rest:

Quote:

Stratology 101
try this to reduce render time even more -

Radiosity = 100%
accuracy 70%
stoch samples 200
Min res = 25
Max = 150
prepass size 1/2 or 1/3

AA = best

this will assure proper aa across the whole render, including the shadows, reflections, refractions too. Geometry wont. takes a little longer to render but is essential.

diffuse depth 1.

imho 2 and 3 are un-natural. 1 gives a more accurate GI effect and is 10 times faster to render. you'll have to up the lighting in general to compensate tho. i rearly use a diffuse depth of more than 1 or occationally 2.

With external scenes 1 bounce simulates GI perfectly imho, internal scenes will sometimes require 2 but i rarely go over 3.
if you got internals (or externals like night time shots) where lighting is poor and relies on bounced light (gi) then a value of 2, 3 or 4 may be required, but as i say, i tend to stear clear of this.

also, you know what colour bleeding is? this helps to simulated the GI effect too. i use a diffuse depth value of 1 most of the time but i also play heavily with the material's 'saturation' levels. this option should be use on the object RECIEVING gi and is a spinner to set the amount of light bleed recieved from other materials. if the lighting levels are rather low and need pepping up a bit try using the saturation option. i love it!

Again, it's all a question of trade offs. you may find that turning the accuracy up to 95% or even 100% and turning the stoch samples down to 50 gives nice results. Personally i like pure stochastic mode rendering, but as you prolly discovered it takes ages to render.

you may also want to use render tags to optomise rendering even further. ie, not every thing in the scene needs to generate/recieve radiosity does it? so why use it?

GI to metals - in theory, if you think about it, why use GI on anything reflective? ie, metals, mirrors etc... i usually switch 'GI Recieve' to off (found in material editor) for mirrors and windows, but keep full GI on all metals. but again, play around you may find a sweet spot.

render tags can force objects to render with radiosity or not, at whatever percentage you choose. the illumination controls in the mat. editor controls individual material gi settings.

And remember, things that dont need gi too much, like tree leaves, scattered grass etc.. turn the gi transmit button to OFF, else long un-needed render times will be there.

Radiosity/gi - Radiosity engine in C4 is the fastest currently on the market, but obviously the higher the settings the longer the render times. For arch rendering never use a diffuse depth of greater than 1. this is the natural setting. Always use as higher accuracy as possible. personally i use 100%, but if ur pc no that good then anything over 75% should suffice. pre-pass size - i use 2 for final rendering. Stochastic samples - atleast 300. i use 500+ (even that sometimes shows artifacts). Min. samples - a value of 20-30 should be optimal for most scenes. max samples - high as poss. i use 100+. For better radiosity rendering us stochastic mode, again samples to 300+ and diffuse to 1. Stochmode takes longer to render but gives a true, more accurate render.

When set the rendering in motion close down the scene from the mem buffer. just saves extra speed.

Stick to normal simple materials if you can. proceedurals and SLA take allot more processing than normal materials.

minimise the render window when rendering and dont continue editing or multi tasking durring rendering. all slows the process down.

Dont try to animate using GI - C4 has a problem in this dept. basically it uses a different gi solution for each frame rendered, so flickering is extreamly noticable. unless you has a super powerfull pc where you can wak up all the settings i'd advise no gi anims.
Animations - i've been looking further into this matter and talking to maxon about it. the solution unfortunately is to use full stochastic mode to get spot on results

you can use normal GI settings with the single animation solution button (i tried it a few times) but the results are not really satisfactory. flickering still happens and because the GI solution isn't updated for every shot the single gi solution looks too flat and un-life like. lets hope Rel 8 will fix this.

dont use reflection blur in the material slots, it takes forever to render. instead render ur image out as a multi layered .PSD or photoshop file and blur the reflections out in ps l8r on. much faster this way.

dont bother trying caustics - in the main archi renders dont use caustics. not needed and not noticed.

HDRI - personally i think this is just a tarty buzz word ppl are using and imho definately not needed. anyway, so easy to fake.

Book of Strat 10:1

Something I have tried personally is that I have been cranking up the GI accuracy w/the render tags on critical objects and then setting the GI accuracy in the render settings low for the entire scene [maybe 50%] . i.e., I did this on my last interior scene, I turned down the GI to 45% for the entire scene. It seemed only my walls and ceilings really needed the higher GI accuracy setting. My furniture and other smaller knick-knacks didn’t show any artifacts with low GI accuracy, but the larger flat surfaces like walls did. So w/a 45% GI accuracy on the scene, I then put tags on my walls, floors and ceilings and forced them to a 85% GI accuracy. That sped things up quite a bit.

And a final note, know what the different GI settings in C4D do. If you haven’t seen it yet, this is, hands down, the best GI explanation for C4D out there bar none:

http://www.mvpny.com/RadTutMV/RadiosityTut1MV.html

it’s important to realize the [I ] “accuracy”[/i] setting in C4D is only a MULTIPLIER for the Min and Max settings. It really has little to do with accuracy, as we would expect it to be.

i.e., If your min = 5 and your max = 10, but your accuracy is at, say, 10, then figure your min is really at 50, and your max is really at 100. If you then take the min = 5 and max = 10 and then use an accuracy of 50, consider your min setting = 250, and your max = 500. Does that make sense? The quality of your samples is controlled by the Stochastic setting. And beware that more isn’t always better.

I’m new toall of this, but these are some of the things that I have been learning in my first few months w/C4D. It’s all info pretty much regurgitated from everyone else like Strat, mdme-sadie, and others active w/C4D.

Best,

Paul

STRAT · February 10th, 2003

stratisms - lol

paul - Rel 8 i find to be about 20% faster rendering.

PF - I've got 1GB of DDR ram in my box, but cinema only uses little of it..??why? can i make it use more?? what's the deal here? any help in any subject in my life would be appreciated..!!!

C4D memory manages in a very different way than most other 3d apps. Go with what it's giving you, thats the way it is.

SLA generally slow you down drastically, as does DOF, but i havent personally used Rel8 DOF yet to comment on

February 6th, 2003	#1 (permalink)
PiNkFlUiD Junior Member Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: uk Posts: 6 Name: kapa despotis	i would like your opinions about these renderings that i did recently, based on a project. I'm a student architecture and intrested in 3d.... any comment would help.. just to mantion, hello everybody...that's my first post.!!!http://www.cgarchitect.com/forum/fil...realism2_1.jpg http://www.cgarchitect.com/forum/fil...=todomatio.jpg __________________ God has the best radiosity engine...

February 6th, 2003	#2 (permalink)
nisus Super Moderator Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Gent Flanders Belgium Europe Age: 32 Posts: 3,276 Name: Evert Vandenberghe	Hi Pinkfluid, Can you give us some spec too? Software, rendering times, settings? rgds nisus __________________ www.ams.be / www.nisusarts.com http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=nisusCGA&p=r

February 9th, 2003	#3 (permalink)
nisus Super Moderator Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Gent Flanders Belgium Europe Age: 32 Posts: 3,276 Name: Evert Vandenberghe	okay, c4d... but do you got more specs? nisus __________________ www.ams.be / www.nisusarts.com http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=nisusCGA&p=r

February 9th, 2003	#4 (permalink)
PiNkFlUiD Junior Member Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: uk Posts: 6 Name: kapa despotis	yes...sorry... I forgot!! Well this rendering took about 8 hours!! ( the living room), and the other one with the balls took 2.5 min. they both have radiosity specs GFORCE 2, AMD XP 1700+ and 1GB DDR...The first rendering took so much because of the extreme radiosity settings...i think.. thank you all for your time in advance!! __________________ God has the best radiosity engine...

February 9th, 2003	#5 (permalink)
STRAT Super Moderator Join Date: Dec 2001 Location: Cardiff, Wales, UK. Age: 36 Posts: 6,503 Name: Stephen Leworthy	nice renderings (no AA?) but the render speeds are scarey :angeuhoh: go to the cinema 4d forum here and look at my post for rendering speed tips see if it helps __________________

February 10th, 2003	#6 (permalink)
PiNkFlUiD Junior Member Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: uk Posts: 6 Name: kapa despotis	Thanks STRAT!! I find your posts very helpfull... I've just started using radiosity and playing around with the settings... I think I could have the shame results, with less rendering times. What about the first pic? the one with the balls? this one took me 3 minutes..(2:48) with radiosity settings.. strength 100% accuracy 80% Pr S 1/2 St. S 300 min 25 max 180 http://www.cgarchitect.com/forum/fil...threeballs.jpg i also used HDRI for this one. __________________ God has the best radiosity engine...

February 10th, 2003	#7 (permalink)
STRAT Super Moderator Join Date: Dec 2001 Location: Cardiff, Wales, UK. Age: 36 Posts: 6,503 Name: Stephen Leworthy	that time for the balls is very fast. wat method did you use to fake the HDRI? just image based lighting with the HDRI map in the ref slot too? also, try turning down the max settings. max settings is useful where you get alot if intersects and straight edges meeting. the 3 balls on the table woulbn't need any more than a max setting of 25-50. also, the higher the accuracy the lower the stoch samples needed. wat was the diffuse depth? i normally use 1 or 2 at a push, but rarely higher. 3 or above yeilds massive render times. HDRI particular need no more than 2 diffuse depth maximum usually. also, watch out where you use MIP and SAT sampling. wrong usage can slow down rendering. Also try not to use the reflection bluring, it's painfully slow. there are numerous effective work arounds to this. was the DOF faked in photoshop? experiment some. nice pics. __________________

February 10th, 2003	#8 (permalink)
PiNkFlUiD Junior Member Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: uk Posts: 6 Name: kapa despotis	thanks again everybody, well...too many questions ..hmmm....I'll do my best!!! with these screene captures, i will answer radiosity settings, and rendering time for this new pic, that i did after i tweaked the settings as you said (STRAT)..! have a look !!! http://www.cgarchitect.com/forum/fil...ttings.jpg.jpg & http://www.cgarchitect.com/forum/fil...rendertime.jpg and the picture is.. http://www.cgarchitect.com/forum/fil...hreeballs2.jpg as for the hdri, i used SLA shaders for this one, to achieve a better brightness contrast, have a look here on how i did it..(credids to the man who did this tutorial!) http://www.cartesiuscreations.com/od...als/sadie.html now, about the DOF, i didn't do it in photoshop, but in c4d itself. I've got version 8, If that makes any difference.. Please tell me what you think of it, and the room..so.. another question..: I've got 1GB of DDR ram in my box, but cinema only uses little of it..??why? can i make it use more?? what's the deal here? any help in any subject in my life would be appreciated..!!! but if you dont have time, just answer the above.. __________________ God has the best radiosity engine...

February 10th, 2003	#10 (permalink)
STRAT Super Moderator Join Date: Dec 2001 Location: Cardiff, Wales, UK. Age: 36 Posts: 6,503 Name: Stephen Leworthy	stratisms - lol paul - Rel 8 i find to be about 20% faster rendering. PF - I've got 1GB of DDR ram in my box, but cinema only uses little of it..??why? can i make it use more?? what's the deal here? any help in any subject in my life would be appreciated..!!! C4D memory manages in a very different way than most other 3d apps. Go with what it's giving you, thats the way it is. SLA generally slow you down drastically, as does DOF, but i havent personally used Rel8 DOF yet to comment on __________________

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