Chaos Corona Forum

Chaos Corona for Cinema 4D => [C4D] General Discussion => Topic started by: Elias2019 on 2025-08-11, 19:48:04

Title: Blocking the sun like in Blender
Post by: Elias2019 on 2025-08-11, 19:48:04

Hi,
It seems it's not possible to limit or block the sun in corona to get the effect like this render in blender, that's right?

Title: Re: Blocking the sun like in Blender
Post by: romullus on 2025-08-11, 21:07:55

Hm, just place some geometry outside of view that would partially block the sunlight and cast the shadow on the subject. Just like it works in RL. If you'd block the sun disk itself, that would be something like solar eclipse and it would have totally different effect on the scene lighting than what is visible in your example.

Title: Re: Blocking the sun like in Blender
Post by: Elias2019 on 2025-08-11, 21:50:49

Thanks Romullus for always response, yeah I meant blocking the sun with geometry to achieve the cloudy day effect and focusing the sun on specific areas of the scene, I didn't mean the eclipse effect. The problem I am facing in corona is that this method doesn't work very well when there is volume fog in the scene, also big sun size that's necessary for soft shadows makes it worse, there's a lot of light diffusion in the scene which covers the blocking geometries making them practically useless, so it won't be possible to focus or limit the light to a specifc area. If you decrease the sun size it will be easier to get more directionality but the problem is that the shadows will become sharp and that's not desired for an artistic cloudy day soft mood.

Despite Corona, GI is very weak in Blender Cycles so it's really easy to block the sun by placing some geometries in front of it because there's almost no light interactions in Cycles which makes it good for that sun blocking purpose!

Title: Re: Blocking the sun like in Blender
Post by: romullus on 2025-08-11, 23:04:58

You can make shadow softer by moving blocking object farther from the subject. Of course you would also have to make it bigger so that its shadow remains at constant size. Changing sun's size is a cheat, so it's better to avoid that if possible.

Can't say much about volume fog though, since i barely ever use it.

Title: Re: Blocking the sun like in Blender
Post by: burnin on 2025-08-12, 00:48:22

It can be done quite closely to what can be achieved w "Physical Sky & Atmosphere"... but first would be nice to see what your current result looks like.
Here's a quick test w/ latest daily.
 (https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=45321.0;attach=212630;image)

Edit:
Added "Volume effect"

(https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=45321.0;attach=212632;image)