VrayC4D Resources Site

What is SurfaceSPREAD?

It's a plugin specialized on the creation of landscape scenes in CINEMA 4D. The plugin has already been demonstrated on some images, including my works Lagoon and Autumn Road (3D World Magazine's Image of the Month, July 2009).

SurfaceSPREAD contains several componente which I will introduce now...
This is only a quick overview, it does not cover all features.

This is part 4 in the series of GI animation tutorials. This slightly differs from the previous tutorials in that it's scene specific - i've provided the mesh and separate files containing all the render settings. It demonstrates the 3 main object animation techniques available in VRAYforC4D (brute force+light cache, irradiance map+brute force and irradiance map+light cache), which you should find fairly adaptable to your own scenes.
Object animation is where anything and/or everything in the scene moves over time other than the camera itself. This might include meshes, materials and lighting solutions. There are alternatives and workarounds to the methods outlined in this tutorial (as discussed in the previous tutorials), but this is the correct 'by-the-book' methodology.
The following examples and animations are pre-cached (where applicable) on a single oct processing mac pro (with 12 gig RAM), rendering 150 frames at 960 x 540 pixel resolution. Final rendering was done using a render farm as even though with VRAYforC4D 1.1 rendering is relatively fast these days, it's still comparatively slow where real scenes/deadlines are concerned. The use of a render farm is a common and normal procedure for the professional practise. Dont forget, whereas final render can nicely be performed over a render farm or a net render solution, the pre-caching must be carried out on a single computer.

Some of the results are pleasantly surprising.

NOTE - since the object animation method of IR + LC is now optimised and super fast as described in the part 2 tutorial, the following methods will generally not be needed any more. But the tutorial still exists as a valid render method.

In part 3 of these GI rendering tutorials I'll be experimenting with a different approach for obtaining flicker free object animation. A lot of people are still suffering with long render times and flickering animations, so I thought I'd try out a different method of gi calculation. It's more of a hybrid method than a new different method, but works very very effectively.

Basically, in an object animation (ie, moving lights or objects etc) the gi solution changes from frame to frame. Part 2 of this series explored the current render methods available to render object animations. The methods described all work perfectly, but due to the very nature of what the render engine needs to calculate (ie, a constant changing gi environment), you need to pay close attention to render settings, gi settings and sample rates. The out come of this means comparatively slow render times. Render times were still relatively fast, but for a home user or hobbyist this isn't much consolation.