16.0

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CINEMA 4D Renderer
You will see that a blue light is being cast on the torus and the floor. The blue sphere is not rendered because
we have made it invisible using the camera’s Compositing tag.
4. Tips and Tricks
• Rendering often requires you to make a choice between speed and quality. Especially scenes using Global
Illumination or Caustics can take a long time to render. This is why we recommend that you experiment with
the Parameters and to initially use low values. For example, set the Global Illumination Diffuse Depth value
to 2 to begin with (the diffuse depth can only be modified if Quasi-Monte Carlo is set to Secondary Method)
and make a test render. If the illumination provided by GI is still too dark, increase the Diffuse Depth value
gradually until you achieve the desired result. However, avoid increasing this value above 4 since this will
increase your render times enormously! If the Secondary Method is set to Light Mapping, a Maximum Depth
value of 16 can be used for starters and increased if the scene is too dark.
• Make generous use of Compositing tags. This makes it possible to reduce the exactness of the rendering,
thus reducing rendering times greatly. As you already know, CINEMA 4D allows you to animate effect
parameters so that you can make changes to them at any time. Imagine caustics that change as you wish or
the focusing of a camera.
• Load a bitmap image in place of a color into the Luminance channel of a material that you use to illuminate a
Global Illumination scene. The objects will then be lit with the colors of the image. This looks especially good
if you use HDRIs. HDRI is an image format that contains special image luminance information and is thus an
excellent choice for this effect. You can find information about HDRIs online.
• You can pep up your scene even more with the post effects Highlights and Glow. Using highlights you can
give your material’s highlights any form you wish, like a star, for example. Glow does just what the name
says – it lets a material glow. Try it!