White Balance Occasionally the question arises as to how to reproduce the "real" color of light sources in a rendered environment. I set out to research this subject, and found a lot of very contradictory information. Some approaches try to categorize light sources by their color temperature. Some then try to come up with some meaningful way of converting that color temperature to RGB values to use in programs like Lightwave or Cinema 4D. Ultimately these approaches all fail to take into account several realities that work against trying to come up with a unified approach to light coloring and rendering...


submitted: 5 years and 3636 days ago

In the early days of 3D video games, textures on surfaces consisted of color information only. The texture would be a picture of whatever material the designer was trying to convey - brick, stone, vegetation, wood, etc. - and would contain shading information as well as the texture and color to create the impression of a complex, dimensional surface...


submitted: 5 years and 3636 days ago

Glass can be a difficult material to capture correctly in a 3D program. Ordinary glass presents us with extremes in nearly every surface attribute. Hard specularity, transparency, reflection, refraction – glass has it all. The transparency and reflective values of glass change with our angle of observation. Glass seems completely transparent to us, yet it casts a shadow. Thus, it is a unique challenge to embody all of these aspects of glass in a material setup.


submitted: 5 years and 3636 days ago

One of the most realistic ways to present a model in Cinema 4D is through the use of global illumination. Cinema 4D uses the term Global Illumination to describe their Radiosity solution. Radiosity takes into account direct illumination of each surface, and adds to that secondary illumination — light bounced off other nearby surfaces. The result can be spectacularly realistic, but incredibly time consuming. In this tutorial, we are using the term Global Illumination to describe a method of illuminating an object with a soft, generally directionless light.


submitted: 5 years and 3636 days ago

For this tutorial you are going to need a special plug-in. Go to www.3Dattack.net and you'll find a plugin called LUMEN by Chris from biomekk.com. LUMEN comes in two versions, LUMEN and LUMEN Lite. Have a look at the sample videos for LUMEN and I think you will agree that its a fantastic deal for $35. However, this tutorial only makes use of the LUMEN Lite plugin, which is free (you'll find it on the bottom of the LUMEN page). Download and install the LUMEN plugin in your Cinema 4D Plugins Folder and restart the program.


submitted: 5 years and 3636 days ago

With the new City Lights map found on my Earth map page, you can add the extra detail and realism of city lights as seen from space. A special texturing tip is presented here to help you ensure that the lights are only visible on the night side of the planet.


submitted: 5 years and 3636 days ago

In this tutorial we will examine a few different strategies for achieving a realistic skin shader in Cinema 4D. Skin has a particular quality that sets it apart from ordinary surfaces: it is luminously translucent. That means that in addition to the light that reflects off the skin's surface, light bounces around the layers of flesh below the skin, illuminating it from the inside.


submitted: 5 years and 3636 days ago

We have received several emails asking how to use the ring textures for planets like Saturn or Uranus. The method is simple, but not very intuitive. This will be a quick lesson in how to use the Bend modifer.


submitted: 5 years and 3636 days ago

This tutorial is not aimed at beginners to C4D - it assumes that you know how to use the poly modelling tools and how to navigate the various attribute panes in the program. There are a LOT of pictures so this tutorial is spread across a number of pages. Let's begin!


submitted: 5 years and 3636 days ago

Many of Cinema 4D's object modifiers contain bevel attributes (called "fillet cap" in the program). These do the job adequately most of the time. However, there are some circumstances where you need more control over how the object edges are bevelled, or you need to use a particular font which, no matter what you try, gives you unfortunate results with Cinema 4D's default tools.


submitted: 5 years and 3636 days ago