Techniques For Simulating Large Spaces ?

[ChrisCousins]

Hey paul - no expert, but one quickie tip is to avoid depth of field! Unless you've got anything right up close to the camera, there should be no depth of field between foreground/background objects, this is guaranteed to make your scene look like a modelled miniature.

Haze is the key IMO, you want shadows to lighten to quite pale towards the horizon, and contrast will disappear.

You can do this in C4D but if it was my project I'd do the renders in layers and work in AE, there's just more control.

Let's say we have a simple hall way, modelled to scale so that its is say 100 m long 80 m high and 50m wide. It has coloumns and high windows.

How would peole generally go about giving this a real sense of scale, the feeling of a massive building.

I am guessing at maybe some dof, would you use a color for the distance ( blue ?)
Would you set up the lighting to transition to blue for distance ?
Would use use a fog shader to get some mistiness for the distance and somehow also have this for the feeling of height ?
Would you use visible lights to achieve the depth haze ?

I often see LOTR like renders ( often in vue) that have that wonderful feeling of grand scale but i can never seem to recreate it well in C4D

Any tips or maybe scene files would be salivated on

[Per-Anders]

Well the first thing with large space is of course scale. Large spaces are made large by being in comparison to smaller objects, a uge cube doesn't look big unless there's somethign to compre it with. So what if you can't have any other features? Then you use your lighting and atmosphere to indicate scale.

Spotlights and light falloff for instance can help, when an object is huge then the lightsource itself must be tiny by comparison, therefore you'd expect that it would take a great deal more lights to light the object up and that their falloff would be very small in comparison to the object.

Then there's depth cueing on massive objects and terrains, over space you get more particles that cause the saturation to go and distant objects to become more indistinct. If possible always place human scale objects in a scene so you can get a sense of scale, and work at the camera FOV too, for a large object to take up not too much space on screen the camera has to be a long way away that can affect the fov and of course the focal distance.

[paulselhi]

One thing that really bugs me is that many people tell us that we should try to model to scale but a 200m cube is far to small to do any work like this with the c4d camera, if i scale the camera to .1 it make no obvious difference

Is there a technique to build a cube of the correct dimensions in meters and have the c4d camera view it at a correct scale ?

edit it seems to help if i have prefs to cm the model a hall say 10000 cm long but still it does seem a bit small

[Mike Abbott]

Suggestion on the scale issue: just work in (and consider C4D units to be) milimeters.

Then your standard cube is 200 mm, rather than 200 meters.

I'm in the group that says work in real world units - 99% of the time I consider C4D units to be mm - even on quite large scale scenes such as your hall.


Mike Abbott

[paulselhi]

thanks mike mm seems to help

[JeremyW]

I would say placing the camera at a low vantage point is 90% of the effect of indicating scale. Exact same scene, but with different camera placement.

[LucentDreams]

With Jeremey first and per second, camera more than anything sets scale not just placement as in Jeremy's but also the focal length. then any size comparisons are the next big indicator.

Softness of shadows, translucency depth, falloff of lights and reflections etc can all contribute, but int he end the camera angle is the most important because while all those little indicators help, in reality we can still make scenes that are very small, seem very large such as the miniatures for LOTR, or a movie like corpse bride.

[flingster]

i'd look to photographic techniques for say landscapes or wide spaces like beaches etc... they don't all apply but they might help direct your thinking/planning.

http://digital-photography-school.com/blog/11-surefire-tips-for-improving-your-landscape-photography/
http://digital-photography-school.com/blog/10-beach-photography-tips/

[paulselhi]

Here is a scene i have been reworking, i am not very happy with it. It is too much like a poor bryce render !! ( Bryce was the first 3d app i ever used..back in the stone age..i don't think my skills have improved one bit since then !!)

OK so this is not a massive room but i still feel i have not captured a true feeling of space with my lighting

One thing i want to work out is the fact that outside the vol light the atmosphere is too clean, dust particles themselves would be lit from the vol light even if they were not in it's direct path. maybe some particle system would do it, or some simple vis lights with noise, perhaps some very light pyrocluster mist

I also think i could do more with straight lighting and maybe just using GI as a very weak fill, but i am hopless with lighting scenes

Well i think i will have to grab some archaeology images from google and try to recreate the lighting based on those images

http://www.black-and-white-to-color.com/stuff/tomb07.jpg

[paulselhi]

Is this better ? More saturation

http://www.black-and-white-to-color.com/stuff/pstomb08.jpg

[SystemofaDown]

I dont know the right terms but right click on the zoom botton on top of your view port and move it to the right i think. This scales the cameras focal lenght i think. For example when i made a render of earth from outer space no matter how i placed the camera it looked like a round ball. Then i messed with this and i got a huge looking earth.

[flingster]

the scale of the pots looks a little off also..would two pots high be as tall as a sarcophagus? dunno to be honest...also the scale of the sarcophagus in comparison with the murials/wall carvings looks off also..i'd have to scout around for some references. there is a block right inthe bottom of view which is a bit distracting..this might have been intensional though..the light feels a little white to me..that said its needs to convey that hot white intensity to a degree...then entrance hole for me is just to perfect...essentially if the photographer had climbed in that way or tomb was discovered from that hole i'd expect to see more damage to the rim edges for the hole...also how come there is no damage to the pot directly below the ledge or any dust on the floor in that area. as for dust in the light volume area...its a nice size to it and even density..however think its needs to be a bit more uneven and patchy distribution because its helping make that area look to clean cg ....if that makes sense..hope that helps...

[kiwi]

A good trick I sometimes use is grab yourself an Otto or the male mesh etc.Next place it against the wall and then decide how large you want the human to look,then scale the accessories around that benchmark.


Another good trick for scale/size is use objects that people automatically equate certain size too,for instance the huge Egyptian columns.



If you want a good scale object from the get go so to speak place a large ladder or rope inside the wall.The great thing about this is you decide the scale by the distance between the rungs or the knots in the rope,and soon as peoples eyes see this object their brains will them almost automatically what size a human should be if they used the ladder etc :)

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