Ultimax Apocalypse

[contrafibbularities]

The lighting seems a bit weird for your WIP renders

Yeah, I know... I'm not too happy with the lighting either. Since you can't pinpoint what exactly looks weird about it, do you have any suggestions on how to do it differently? For example, how you would generally set up the lights for such renders?

[Flux]

Afraid I wouldn't be able to help there as I've never used C4D. For Max I generally use a Skylight/HDRI, a directional light for specular and then if anywhere needs brightening up a bit some onmi's for rim lighting etc. Don't know if you can transpose those types of lights over to C4D.

[contrafibbularities]

I haven't spent much time on lighting in C4d, but the terms you mentioned do sound familiar, so that's a starting point. I'll give it a try and see if I can improve the lighing a bit. Thanks for the info, what you said does sound helpful to me! I'd appreciate it if you could stick around to tear apart my next light set-up, chances are it won't be perfect either...

[polymodeler]

Create plane, scale it to be little bigger than your model. Make sure that model is grounded, create sky. Now create material, check only color channel and put brightness to 100%. Apply that mat to sky and plane, add compositing tag to plane and check compositing background in AM. That way plane and sky will blend without ugly horizont. For light you can use whatever you want, for example use area light, scale it big, rotate by 90° and put on top of model. In AM enable area shadows, its slower but better. If shadows are bleeding too much outside, lower the outer radius in details tab. Its totally simple but good lighting for WIP.

The prob with your model WIP is that it looks like its floating, this way shadows will ground it

Tihomir

[contrafibbularities]

That sounds really good, Tihomir, thanks for the short tutorial, I will definitely give it a try!!

The model looks like it's floating because the height of the ship is not even (see the first image, which is a wireframe screenshot from the right), meaning that part of it doesn't touch the ground. Maybe my light set-up makes that effect even worse. The second image shows one of my previous renders, but without the ground. Does that look any better to you or would you say there's still something else that's weird about the lighting?

[contrafibbularities]

This is in addition to my previous posting. I did a quick test with the setup suggested by Tihomir, and I like it a lot. I did part of the big gun for the ship this morning, and used that for my test render.

Had to crank up the intensity of the area light considerably because the scene was fairly dark at the standard 100%.

The back of the image shows a pretty sharp transition from the plane object to the sky background. What should I do to make the plane blend better with the background (apart from your tip with the compositing tag, which I used)? Is the plane object still too big?

It seems I also need to reduce the radius of the area light on the details tab a bit more, doesn't it? I assume that the image still shows what you referred to as "bleeding" in your previous posting. How can I avoid the pixelated shadow areas? I switched antialiasing to "Best" and reduced the threshold to 5%, which was at least a bit of an improvement. Anything else I could do to make that look better?

[polymodeler]

Yep, much better

Scale the area light a bit smaller, and use floor instead of plane.

Here is C4D file (r.10), I was use two default setting area lights. Only difference is that one has shadows enabled and other not.

Tihomir

[contrafibbularities]

That was a big help, Tihomir, thanks a lot, you pushed me in the right direction! Thanks for the files with the presets, too! The light set-up is really simple and very effective. With this, test renders will be so much more fun. :-)

[polymodeler]

No prob., glad it helped you

Im looking forward to your new WIPs.

[contrafibbularities]

Finally, the gun part is finished... So here are the latest screenshots of the Apocalypse model after video No. 20. All that's left now is the engine part at the rear, and the fighter ships.