From the course: Cinema 4D R19 Essentials: VFX

Add lighting and environment effects - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

From the course: Cinema 4D R19 Essentials: VFX

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Add lighting and environment effects

- [Instructor] So far, we've modeled some geometry after calibrating this camera this photo. And we've added some additional objects into the scene, but the problem is they're not grounded, they need some shadows. So we're going to add some lighting and environmental effects to make these objects feel more integrated. Let's begin by creating a light. We can create an area light and it's created over here. Now we can rotate this around, move it up, and bring it back a touch. And we can also choose to set the active object as a camera which means we'd be looking through our light which is very handy for when you want to position a light a bit more interactively, a bit more intuitively. We're looking at the light's perspective here. Now if we just come back here and choose use default camera or our camera here, and we can come back and we're looking through our camera that we've set up. They have a light in the scene now and which turn on area shadows. And now we can see we're catching some shadows here. Now we may need to come back and tweak that, but what I want to do is just get in environment. Now the environment can be useful giving ourselves a bit of global illumination but it's a sheet for that so if we render now brightening up those really dark shadows. And this is looking a lot better. Now finally, I'd like to add a sky object. Because we've got reflective materials, we need proper environment for them to reflect. Now we can use an HDRI to light this. And I'm going to go to the content browser and search for HDRI. So what you can do, if we just come back, you make sure you're in the presets. We'll search for HDRI. In that folder there, we can click in and choose one of the HDRIs that we have available to us. Now I just want to check what this one does. So I'll just drag it into my material manager, close this one down, and then I'm going to scroll to it and drag it onto the sky in my object manager. And if I choose a tag, I can do Cinema 40 Tags, compositing. And then I don't want the sky object to be seen by the camera, so I would uncheck that. Now if I render, we're getting some pretty nice lighting happening based on the HDRI that we have. But I think it's kind of rotated the wrong way. So the trick I like to do is hold down shift and create a sphere and I'll make it a bit bigger so we can all see what's going on. And you can see the sky object on the sphere now. If we come back over to the sky object and rotate it and I'll press n r to turn off X-ray mode and then n a so that we're in gourad shading. Now if I press alt r to bring out the interactive render region, increase the quality. And I just want to check what's happening with the lighting here. It's quite strong over there. That's where I keep rotating this and seeing what we've got. Maybe that will do it. Okay, so I'm just going to disable this sphere and then press alt r and actually I'll press command r just so we can see the rendered image. So by adding environmental effects, lights, and illuminating the scene with a sky object, we can make these objects that we've added to the image feel a lot more integrated.

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