Cinema 4D - White floor

[eilsoe]

ok, howz it done...? I've tried everything... (well duh, of course not, then I would've figured it out :sure: )

What I mean is a completely white floor, which catches shadows and casts reflections.


I can't figure it out... of course not only a white material is needed.. which is as far as I've come.. a white material fades into black when light is not present, meaning the material will only be white near light.

what I need is a material that will stay white even in darkness. and catch shadow, and cast reflections. :smirk:


can it be done? I know it can... :)

[DDD]

I am sorry if this does not help but in 3ds and LW you have a render setting for floor. In the render dialogue you can set the grid to act as an infinite floor. Maybe C4D has something similar. Also have you tried using a plane? for your fade could you just use a falloff map. Then again I should shut up cause I have not used c4d

[eilsoe]

lol, it has an object called a floor yes, which makes an infinite plane, i know, but the question was material wise ;)

altho I seem to have figured something out... I use a certain tag on it, and it becomes all white (if the material I assigned it is white), and then it can recieve shadows that way... with no falloff at all (neat :thumb: )

still strugglin' on the reflections...

[Voetsjoeba]

If you make a new material, colour it white and make it reflective, you could apply it on the floor :)

[DDD]

I would assume it is not as easy as what Voetsjoeba said so I will not say what I was going to say. Another thing you could try is place a plane on top of the ground plane this will allow you to assign a material to a patch and give that plane the same color as the ground plane add reflection and fallof so it blends.....jsut a thought but I really should be quiet since I have not used c4d.

[prstudio]

could you mix two materials?

[Nocturn]

Like eilsoe said use a tag on the floor, the tag is "Compositing".

Make a material, set it's brightness to 100%. Make a floor object. Right-click the floor object in the object manager, from the menu that pops up choose New Tag>Compositing Tag. Now from the attributes manager check the "Compositing Background". This will make it all white no matter of the lightsources in the scene, and it will also catch shadows.

Any reflective materials you place in the scene will reflect this all white floor.

Badaboum :)

[prstudio]

i tried that and it made everything white, when i put a sphere into the scene with a colored reflection material, it only shows half the sphere, the other half is white no matter where i put it...

[eilsoe]

noc: Right, I got that far, but I also want the floor to reflect the object, not the object to reflect the floor ;)

[prstudio]

what tag did you use eil?

[eilsoe]

look at noc's post :)

a compositing tag :)

[prstudio]

i did that one and it just turned everything in the world white
no shadows

[prstudio]

ugh kinda got it, but not quite...what am i doing in 3d work!?

[eilsoe]

hehe, the same as me, HOPING to make somehing cool by accident ;)

[eilsoe]

ok ppl:

http://www.bang-olufsen.com/


how to make those ultra soft shadows like the ones on the B&o logo?

[DDD]

couldn't you just make a plane object...........up the difuse, med reflectivity specular and gloss. And to get it so your reflections arent perfect use a falloff on the plane object. I think those are more soft reflections than they are shadows. But I will restate I know nothing of c4d.

[eilsoe]

But I will restate I know nothing of c4d.

we know d00d, you've said it 3 times in this thread :P

[prstudio]

lightsource too, i noticed last night that i could get a softer shadow if i changed my lightsource settings-

also high definition render rofl

then who knows...lovely how there aren't any tutorials for this out there gah

ElectronGeek HELP!

[eilsoe]

yeah, no tuts... :(

EG! WE NEED C4D TUT'S!!!

[mlk]

http://www.kirupaforum.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=28955&highlight=white+render+room

[prstudio]

alright, how do i make the floor show shadows, and please post what you did mlk, like a summation-cause that just seems to have bits and pieces...

[eyeinfinitude]

In order to have shadows, you need to enable them with your light source. Double click on your light object and there should be a drop down menu for it. I usually use soft shadows.

[prstudio]

k i got them, but i must be doing somethign wrong, cause there aren't any shadows...i'm a really novice at this, so I'm just going to tinker around for a while...thanks for the help you all- but maybe this is something you have to get used to in order to use.

[prstudio]

ok this is what i have so far, im using the demo, so i cant edit the materials or save my work...


how do i get it softer...is it light? or is it material?

thanks for the help on this ya'll!!!!!!!

http://www.poorreflection.com/ghet0.jpg

[eyeinfinitude]

Did you set the shadows to soft? Also how far up is your light source? How many instances of the light source are in your array?


Your light source is really intense so how can you have a soft shadow?

Also try applying a darker material to your floor instead of pure white.

[eyeinfinitude]

prstudio, could you please use the EDIT button instead of posting consecutively. It makes the thread shorter and cleaner.

[prstudio]

http://www.poorreflection.com/softdrkgray.jpg

did some thread cleaning, sorry about that, was in the heat of battle...

how is it looking eg? i feel like i just have to make it all brighter?

[eyeinfinitude]

Yeah it looks better, keep at it. =)

[DDD]

are you rendering with radiosity also? If not you should also what kind of light source are you using?

[prstudio]

how about this :):):)

[DDD]

that is very close all you have to do now is play with the light temperature and distance and maybe the type

[prstudio]

something different, that soft look is still escaping me...

[prstudio]

hey EG, is there a way to make the light "dirty", as in maybe white particles dispersed throughout it?

Or a glowing fog?

I see how to make all the shadows, reflections, and whatnot...but that soft sugar cube look I'm just not getting so far.

Is it a material on the cube that makes it look soft? Or a light setting?

If light, which one... I'm kind of stuck on materials using the demo version, I can't seem to edit and save the changes to any of them.

[prstudio]

I found this tutorial for 3dsmax, not exact, but it does descibe the basic steps to get as far as i got-

and a lot of it applies to cinema 4d, just in different places

http://www.the3dstudio.com/(wtff3jb0mukvbqe4g5ok4445)/tutorials.aspx?id_tutorial=121

^basically what I figured out on my own and with the supplied array ideas...but it might help someone

this kind of doubles what everyone has said...more in depth on the shadow settings though...

i'm going to keep trying at this- again if someone knows a secret please tell

[Nocturn]

No secrets really, the softshadow look is achieved by radiosity. The link you posted shows a fake radiosity approach which can look good but you don't get the nice color bleeding effect of true radiosity.

I tried to duplicate the bang/O front pic, came out like this:

http://membres.lycos.fr/waboc/soft/softshadow.jpg

What you'll notice in the bang/O pic is that there are two types of shadows, the soft one provided by radiosity and a hard very faint shadow from a spotlight with a hard shadow. Having a hard shadow like that just makes the pic a bit more interesting I think. The pic above is not how it came out in the render, this is just the rendered pic without PS:

http://membres.lycos.fr/waboc/soft/softshadownoPS.jpg

In PS, very simple, just duplicated the layer, gaussian blur, then set blending mode to screen (or overlay if you want). Then duplicated the gaussian blur layer, set it's blending mode also to screen, then changed in the layer blending options so it only effects the darker parts of the image, then changed it's hue and saturation to a much bluer tone. This make the shadow parts have the nice blue tint like in the bang/O pic, instead of the grey "dirty" looking shadows.

The setup for radiosity in Cinema is also very simple. First make a sky object, then make a material and just check it's luminosity property. Set this to a slight blue tint (or whatever color tint you want your scene to have) and apply it to the sky object. The text just had a simple material with a slight blue tint also, didn't use the specular channel since it washed out parts of the text.

I also added a spotlight with a very faint hard shadow, and also set the lights brightness low, to about 30%, otherwise the pic gets too washed out.

Now just turn on radiosity, for this pic I had accuracy to 65%, samples 300, min-rez 5 max rez-300.

What the sky object does, combined with radiosity, is that it illuminates the object from all sides, it becomes like an all surrounding light source, that's why you get the soft shadows.

About the compositing tag:
If you want the white floor to also catch reflections, well then you will have to use multipass rendering and make a separate shadow pass and a reflection pass. This is a much better approach then just the compositing really, since you a lot more control over every aspect of the pic. You can just composite these together in PS over any color background.

[DDD]

I think I said render with radiosity a while back in a post and no one listened to me :h:

[DDD]

Originally posted by 3d-iva
are you rendering with radiosity also? If not you should also what kind of light source are you using?

:h:

[prstudio]

i was reading today, and thought, radiosity it has to be that....lol

thank you nate...you rock...ill post up tonight what i come up with

[DDD]

the reason that I mentioned lighting because in max and lightwave a well placed spot light can also give you a soft shadow and save loads on render time without using radiosity. In most cases.

[prstudio]

http://www.poorreflection.com/prstudio.jpg

:crazy:

[eyeinfinitude]

Originally posted by 3d-iva
a well placed spot light can also give you a soft shadow and save loads on render time without using radiosity. In most cases.

I agree, I never render with radiosity, takes too long. I just play around with my light array till I get the desired result. After a few times, I just get a feel to where the right spots are.

[prstudio]

http://www.poorreflection.com/yay.jpg

Thank you everbody!

[eyeinfinitude]

hahah :P

[the_transporter]

how do you type text in cinema 4d?

[prstudio]

under splines, select the text outline one, then edit to say what you want, then under objects go to nurbs and select the "extrude" one. Over in the object manager at the top right, click and drag the spline containing your text and make it a "child" of the extrude nurb...badda bing!

[eyeinfinitude]

haha prstudio, is a C4D pro now! So when are you going to write some tutorials? :P

[the_transporter]

alright, thanks prstudio :)

[DDD]

wow that is alot of stuff to add text...*cringes at the thought of trying c4d*

[prstudio]

rofl EG,
and it's weird cause it makes sense to my mind 3d, like i've tried 3dsmax before and i just understand c4d better so far-

any rate, i should hope i learned something after my marathon learning experience last night...

maybe i'll add a soft light tutorial to my list of things i said i would do but havent yet...

if its ok with you two, to combine everything ?

[eilsoe]

****, turned out too bright :sure:


oh well, I tried! :P

[prstudio]

awesome man!

[VisualAid]

to get my soft shadows i use these is this a bad way of doing things

I use

White Texture 95% lumonosity white on the floor with a reflective map

on the object i use a standard shader made whiter and less shadowed.

For my light i use a simple omni with a 250x250 shadow map and 75% density i place it close to the object i want a shadow from.

I then place a sun rreally high up to light the enviroment with standard settings.

:D

I find it's nicer than using radiosity.

Also why do i get really dogey jagged lines when i render the 3d view? :/ i think ant aliasing render settigs is on geometry but if i put it on best it takes ages to render anything!

[DDD]

that is the nature of antialias, your proggy has to render transparent polys so it will take a bit longer. You really dont have to render with the antialias on best if you are not doing video. Heck even on my video stuff I use medium extreme (LW).

[DDD]

not to beat this topic into the ground but I was thinking about your question. About the white floor and soft shadows. Not sure if you ever figured out a method but here is what I did.

1. I created a big ground plain (100m) gave it a matte surface with high reflectivity (100 not really necessary unless you want reflection in the shadows)

2. Then I created a dome around my plain (same size radius 50m), flipped the normals so they are facing inwards. The gave it a white colored texture with a luminous value of 100.

3. Turned off any other default lights so now the only light is the dome.

4. Place my object on the plane and rendered it with radiosity.

I tried to use simple means that will be common to all apps the reversing normals and such (I used LW)

note. You will have to place with your camera settings. I came up with this. DId not tweak it much...but I think this may be what you are after.

http://www.implod.com/img/skydome_logo.jpg

EDIT: I forgot to give the ground plane gloss and a specular level..Be sure to do that for more realism. But I am not about to wait for another 30 min render. :beam:

[DDD]

added a lil gloss/specular and dropped diffuse for the ground plane.....eh.....I was bored

http://www.implod.com/img/skydome_logo_angle.jpg

[morse]

sweet. I'm going to need to try this...

[Mad_Dog!]

Well i tried... Didnt turn out very good :!

**edit**

JEG ER IKKE EN REJEOST EILSOE ! :p:

[eilsoe]

du er både en tumpe og en rejeost! ;)


:P

[mdipi]

ugle spider mus!

[Mad_Dog!]

nej jeg regner med at de "_spiser_" dem : !?

[eilsoe]

lol dipster! Owls don't "spike" mice! :P