renderbaron is a studio for animation & design in Düsseldorf/ Germany. The recent showreel 2014 features the highlights of our work covering Visual Effects, TV-Commercials & 3D-visualisation.
https://vimeo.com/108355122
See www.renderbaron.de for details and don´t forget to “like” @ www.fb.com/renderbaron 
Cheers
Marc
I really like the train station and especially the escalator in there. Maybe it’s because I’m working on something similar right now. 
Thanks!
The subway-station is actually done back in Cinema 4D R11.5 (which means without Linear Workflow…). Rendered with Standard Render, without Global Illumination (as all of my work).
Marc
Wow, it looks like a GI-render! I’m not very familiar with Cinema 4D as I’m using Blender (with GI), but if you only had direct lights available you’ve done a marvelous job on the lighting.
Thanks man!
All of my work is done without GI. Its just an elegant manual light setup, and some smart shaders. 
Marc
Why is it that you’re not making use of GI in your renders? Wouldn’t it make things more easy to get to realistic results?
Well, lighting is an aesthetical and creative process which should not completely be left to pure technical automatisms - as a side-effect of rendering. Therefore I love setting up easy and efficient light-setups which I complete with intelligent shaders.
This combination and some expertise always give me compareable results to GI. (By the way this expertise led me to be a Maxon Certified Instructor, teaching Shading, Lighting & Rendering and writing a corresponding Maxon Training Guideline.)
I am not dogmatic about not to use GI, but to my experience I sleep much better, when my animation-renderings are finished the next morning without any unexpected flickering or similar artifacts. (And by the way I am teaching also a proper use of GI in Cinema 4D )
You might want to check out my talk at Siggraph 2013 where I presented some of my lighting-techniques: https://vimeo.com/72218523
Cheers
Marc
While I think GI gives this little tad extra realism that I missed all the years using scanline renders, I also see the advantages of this… let’s call it ‘old-school’ lighting approach. To fake indirect light, color bleeding and caustics requires lots of lighting hacks, I for the most part was happy when I could get rid of it. In many of your renders I could still tell you didn’t use a GI-renderer (but not the subway of course ;)). I prefer lighting to be more intuitive like for a real-world photograph with all its natural side effects. Of course this sometimes requires hacks too, the other way around, if you need non-photorealistic rendered imagery.
Anyways, I think your way of lighting is a nice one and I will consider using it now for an experimental project involving a large cave where I have to deal with lot’s of indirect light and therefore loooong render times. So thank you for the link to the inspirational talk of yours.
Hm, no you can´t? - perhaps I cheated and used GI instead? Besides visualization intentionally looking abstract my renderings are definitely comparable to a GI-version - because I do compare them.
I often see renderings where GI obviously is used but doesn’t enhance realism/ credibility. Or where GI is used but for no reason, meaning: it easily could have been replaced by just few light sources and some smart shaders - at a fracture of rendertime. For that there are also many examples in your own online-portfolio.
Manual lighting does not require a lot of hacks. If you´re comfortable in understanding real light and have a routined analytic eye (skills you always should have as an artist) you will find some really simple solutions that just look very dedicated. So the same result can be achieved by some really simple and effective steps of manual lighting - especially when it comes to animation at a fracture of time.
The lighting-masters at Pixar use GI as a last extra on a manual light-setup that is already virtous. See http://graphics.pixar.com/library/PointBasedGlobalIlluminationForMovieProduction/paper.pdf for “before/ after”. Now that is using GI responsibly!
But having another Pixar-quote from last years Siggraph in mind (“Rendertimes more than doubled”) that little extra in normal studio-/ freelancer-scales could also be achieved by some smart and elegant workarounds.
Cheers
Marc
You’re very self-confident, but comparable doesn’t necessarily means that they are indistinguishable from each other. I wouldn’t consider myself the better artist and I didn’t want to compare my skills to yours anyway. Just wanted to note that a trained eye can see the difference. And the untrained eye maybe can “feel” it(?) as you nicely pointed out in your talk.
As a side note, what I noticed in renders with such elaborate lighting settings such as yours is, that they start to look artificial because you pay so much attention to every little reflection and a harmonic lighting. CG-artists tend to overdo it nowadays is my impression. Perfectly lit environments isn’t something you experience in real life much. Sounds contradictory but that’s what I dislike on todays VFX films, they often look “overharmonized”.
As I pointed out I don’t intend to have an indistinguishable light in all of my shots, especially when it comes to visualizations with tight budgets. But to pick out a good example: the three shots “ivy-courtyard/ old house exterior/ bathroom interior” where done with and without GI and the manually lit ones DO look exactly the same as their GI-pendant.
Cheers
Marc
Isn’t render time cheaper than artist time? So maybe in the end it isn’t all that cost effective to reconstruct a GI image with direct lights for faster rendering. Especially when you have to prepare the GI image for reference as well.
Just to make clear, I’m not evangelizing photorealism, artificial styled visualizations are perfectly fine to me. Keep up the good work!
Thanks man. Yeah, basically the term “rendertime is sparetime” might sound correct. But with regards to lighting- & rendering-iterations and little needs for improvement only visible in final renderqaulity it might break you deadline if you rely on that term too much.
You always should render final quality multiple times, because some artifacts you only see in the final result. So, to my experience rendertime is more or less waiting-time, waiting if you are finished or if you have to rerender. :-S So keep render times short!
Greetings from Maxon Usermeeting in Hamburg…
Marc