Advanced Abstract Renders

This tutorial will bascially help you create more advanced renders, goin into HDRI, Radiosity, Caustics with photon lighting etc. First we wanna make our render. What were goin to do is just click the square in the right hand corner of our workspace. Looks like this.

Then take the spline tool and draw in the first three boxes something random. Like this.

You should now have three spline objects. Select Loft Nurbs And add the splines to the Loft nurbs like so.

Then click the bquare in the top-left box, right hand corner.

Click your loft nurb bject and press "C" on the keyboard. This will set it at current state. What your goin to do now is add a "Bend", "Twist" and "Bulge".

Apply them to your Loft nurbs. Select your bend object, make sure its on unlimited. and set the settings to what fits your render best.

Do the same to your "Twist" and "Bulge" object. You can also move, rotate and change size of your modifier objects if needed. Now add two Explosion FX

and apply them to your Loft Nurbs. Move them around to the "bulkier" parts of your render.

Add them to a Null Object. (Objects>>Null Object) Then add your Null Object to a HyperNURB Object. Now if this is too simple what you can do. Goto Null Object. (ATM this wont have anything in it) apply this to your HyperNURBS. Duplicate the Null Object that contains your Loft Nurbs. (copy(ctrl+c) and paste(ctrl+v)) Add the two Null Objects with LOFT NURBS IN THEM. to your Null Object with nothing in it. This way you dont ahve to use mutiple HyperNurbs. Can cut down rendering time. You can rotate both Null objects (containing loft nurbs) to your liking. Then add perspective and rotate the camera angle. Here is the simple render I have.

This is the FUN PART! Adding materials. For this type of Render I like goin for something that attracts light but stays dark. So Ill do my mat the old fashion way. =P

Ima go ahead. and go into render settings. Adjust the rays, reflection and shadow depth now. Also untick Auto Light.

So right now ima add a light object. Cause atm I have no light source on my render.

Make sure your light is Omni, and has soft shadows. Then goto Caustics.

When in Caustics tick, surface and volume caustics. For the purpose of this tutorial ill use a lower Photon count. and lower energy percentage. For this to work, go back into render settings and goto Caustics. use settings like this. Dont be afraid to experiment though.

Here is the render atm. The first light object is semi-behind the render. So I duplicated and lit a wider area of the render. This time I used ALOT less photons but more energy. Something like 750-900photons. Energy at 100%.

What we can do now is use some HDRI. Now I am not goin really into detail on this whole thing and how to get it perfect. theres better tuts made for that. But ill tell you how to do some simple-ness. Select a sky object.

Right-click your sky object and goto Cinema 4D tags>>Compositing..

Then untick "Seen by camera". The others are just optional.

Create a new material. Untick specualr and color. Tick Luminance. The goto texture>> load image. Load a random image. Ill use a pre-existing old piece I used with a dark red. I can edit these colors later in PS. Make sure to give it a blur. If you like (may make it better) Load the same image under the reflection channel. This time without blur. It gives it a better effewcrt sometimes. If you edit the dispersion under the reflection channel you can also focus parts where you like the most ambience. Well. According to the iamge I am using now. It differes for the image. so experiment if you wish :)

Somtimes I like using floor objects for an even better effect. using the same mat as my sky object. I will make the mat of the floor transparent though something like 30-80% trans. Ill go ahead and do that. If you use a floor object. What you want to do. is set it up at angle in front of your render. so its reflections will show on the render. You should also use the compositing tags for this. Here is what I have so far.

Now atm my render isnt in extreme need of radiosity. So ill move up the lights. to get a slighter darker feel. then adjust radiosity. What radiosity is goin to do. Is lighten the render itself. So if your render is really dark. and you like what lighting you have on it. Radiosity is the easy way out. Now im not goin in depth on this too much either, most HDRI tuts should tell you what does what in the Radiosity channel. So I just use defualt settings. adjust the stochastic samples to a smaller value. and put the strength low. adjust the min/max value to 70/150. If there is unwanted pieces in your render. Go back to the Loft Nurb. Pick the live selection tool, and the polygon tool. (shown below) and Select what you want to delete. (the polygons in red are selected) Then press delete.

See what I removed?

It also affects other polygons. for the best or for the worse. so be careful. :) Now lets edit the renders settings. I usally render at 2560x2048. twice the size of my comp screen reso. I also save as a TARGA, with alpha channel for transparent background. You can adjust DPI when you save. ill leave it default for now. Dont mind the radiosity. and be careful of the caustics. they wont be the same for your render most likely. The onto the effects. I always use the sharpen filter at 5-20%. Every now and then ill throw in the depth of field. with bg blur, distance blur. and autofocus. Usually not to strong. And the options again..

And thats about all we need to do for now. Lets see what my finish result will be. I duplicated my final null object btw. and rotated tried for more. :) My final render with the HDRI. Had a dark red tint and some purples. I adjusted the colors by going to (IN PHOTOSHOP) Image>>Adjustments>>Selective Color.