Does C4D support exclude lighting?

[sad]

hopefully r8 will support it.

[LucentDreams]

no it doesn't but I am curious, why would you want such a feature? would negative lighting suffice?

[job de boj]

hello
may be you can use the render tag > on / off seen by Rays ? > on / off seen by GI ? or on / off generate and receive GI in the material ?

[Caravaggio]

I'd consider rendering seperately and compositing.

[Grey]

I can see uses for exclude lighting, but it seems to me that limited range lights would work for most scenarios.

[chesterlampwick]

I'm really hoping to see exclusive (inclusive) lighting in the next version of C4D. It is such a tremendous time saver and allows for so much more control of your lighting steups. Tweaking fall-off settings works but requires a lot of rendering for testing the balance.

[Grey]

can you give an example of something you've used exclude lighting for?

I'd really like to know, because although I can see uses for it I also see potential problems (shadows etc... or lack thereof)

[Paul L. Ming]

Hiya.

Here's a few:

-- one or two small lights in front of a characters eyes and/or mouth; no other aspects of the face/scene get affected.

-- "dark" (space is a good example) scenes where you want to light a certain area without worying about other stuff getting that light. (a falloff of the right size would probably work too; but just excluding is sooo much quicker than fiddling with falloff values).

-- wanting to light something a certain way, with multiple lights for effect, but you only want 1 (or whatever) specular highlights on other objects in the scene.

-- fake radiosity more easily

-- cut down on your render time


Those are off the top of my head. I'm sure there are more. :)

[LucentDreams]

AHHH I see, so it allows people to be lazy when lighting a scene.

My suggestion is really learn how things work and why, then you can thhink ahead without tonnes of testrenders. become confident in you rknowledge of things, and how they correspond. T think a prime example was my suggestions on how to help the shading of KIWI's ship. Its not like I had the model there to do test renders and such, but I gave a pretty thorough explanation of how to change the shading settings and such to achieve the desired effect. I mean when you are making a metal texture, do you do a whole bunch of testrender to get the look? I don't, I go... "OKAY I NEED METAL, IRON WITH A LITTLE RUST FROM CONDENSATION DRIPPINGS FROM THE PIPE ABOVE." then I paint the image, make the texture, and doe a really low quality render. Very rarely do I find myself waaaay off, never perfect though, so I do use test renders, but when I look at that test render, I look at what is wrong and why, and how to fix it and tweak those settings. Knowing what the tools do is better than knowing how to use them.

[chesterlampwick]

I don't think it's a matter of being lazy, but rather a control issue. In live-action, they have these guys called key-grips (who work in tandem with the gaffer) who's job it is to exclude light from certain parts of a scene - so as to direct the veiwers eye to what is important and what it is the director wants the audience to see. Simple example: say you are lighting a character with darker skin tone and he's wearing a light coloured shirt. In order to light the face properly there is a good chance that that shirt will be blindingly hot and completely distract from the intended focal point of the shot - the actors face. Sure you could dick around for hours with the light position and fall-off values to tone that shirt down, but there's a much more effective way. Take a lesson from live-action cinematography where a black mask or semi-opaque material would be used to tone down the amount of light hitting the shirt. I suppose in 3D you could use a semitransparent chunk of geometry or something to accomplish this but why mess around with that? Just restrict that light to the face geometry and hit the shirt with a less luminous fill light associated only to the shirt - problem solved. The other "highend" packages out there have selective lighting and for good reason - efficiency and control. C4D is a great package and I hope they include this feature in the next release.

[LucentDreams]

Where in Vancouver are you at ??? we should talk:beer: ]

Anyways, if you want to use live action as the example, and a sensible example at that, why not do it like they do. I mean in live action they can't simply say the shirt recieves no lighting. they have to bounce things away from it. as for messing with fallofss and positions, what I was saying in the previous post, was that if you understand these well there shouldn't be much fooling and testing. I have to say it is a feature I personally would never use.

[STRAT]

yeah, not a matter of being lazy, just a matter of what ur used to.

when i switched over to cinema from max the include/exclude from lights option was the biggest dissappointment for me that c4 didnt have.

i used this option all the time in max. c4 uses a different way of working, and does things differently, but this option is still top of my list for v8. together with render region to file.

[LucentDreams]

why render region to file I don't get that one at all.

[STRAT]

well, say i render a 2000x1500 pixel image.

say i change something in my model and need to re-render that individual bit in the picture. well how do i re-render that bit at 2000x1500 pixels at the moment in V7.3? you cant. i dont want to re-render the whole scene as it may have taken hours to render.

when this region is rendered to file i can then comp it into my main piccy in photoshop. no re-render of whole scene. use this function in max all the time.

[marcom]

i agree that a render region to file option would be a nice addition to the c4d toolset. however there's a nice workaround from the "photoarea" to this:

just make a polygon plane that covers everything in front of your camera.
delete the intended view area from the plane. assign the plane a material (without reflections or highlights...). be sure to tag the plane to not cast shadows.
render. comp in photoshop.

this worked for me in most cases.

it is not as fast as a region render because cinema still has to compute the shadowmaps for the covered regions (hope i'm not wrong on this one...), but really faster then doing some "uncovered" 2000x2000 renders over and over again.

hth

cheers marcom

[MJV]

Light exclusion sets is top of my list of desired lighting enhancements right after true inverse square falloff. I don't expect Maxon will implement more physically accurate inverse square falloff, because it isn't a trendy yet and nobody besides me wants it.

But light exclusion inclusion sets are essential imo. Take the example of a glowing orb that you want to cast light as well as shadow. If you place a shadow casting light inside the ball, then you have to turn the ball's shadow casting property off, or you won't be able to see the light. But then the orb itself casts no shadow, which is a problem. Exclusion inclusion sets allow you to easily work around that issue and are useful anytime you want to use a light to fake or emulate radiosity.

I can't imagine that exclusion inclusion sets aren't slated for XL8.

[markdc]

Originally posted by Kaiskai
AHHH I see, so it allows people to be lazy when lighting a scene.



Allows people to make more productive use of their time.

[Guyon]

There is nothing lazy about wanting a light to be excluded from an object. Think more like, is a feature which give you more control and artistic options to a scene. I use this feature all the time in 3ds MAX to add enhanced lighting effects.

Cinema 4d V9 has this feature and it is very easy to use.

[azazel]

what an old thread.....

Fortunately 8,5 has theis feature as well, i use it all the time. Real time saver. And simple to use, unlike Maya's light linking.

[LucentDreams]

True enough Guyon,actually this feature was added mere months after this thread at siggrpah when release 8 came out. This thread is after all 2 1/2 years old now!!! I know your a new member but seriously posting on a thread that ended 2 1/2 year ago with no real unresolved issue is kinda crazy ;) appreciate the eagerness though.

One note, light exclusion is so simple in cinema and fairly simple in max, that it mght seem lazy, but play with light linking (and of of its buggy quirks) in maya and it won't be a lazy method anymore ;)

[LucentDreams]

what an old thread.....

Fortunately 8,5 has theis feature as well, i use it all the time. Real time saver. And simple to use, unlike Maya's light linking.

OH my god, our posts are waaaaay to identical.

[azazel]

While we are at it, ligh linking can be very useful if you want separate light sets for characters and for the rest of the scene. Problem with shadows is easy enough to solve by rendering shadows separately.

[LucentDreams]

yes, although cinema also allows a fair bit of control over shadows too so I usually don't have issues with shadows. Especially with the ability to use shadow only lights.

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