Messages

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[C4D] General Discussion / Re: Is HDRI Lighting Generally Noisier?

« on: 2025-07-23, 19:51:28 »

In this case, it's only a 4-second shot, but the client wanted it super smooth. With my two Macs rendering, it was taking 7 hours and I didn't have much time for mistakes. I also had several similar shots. I've had good results using 5% noise and denoiser, but these were noisier still, even after the denoiser was cranked up.

When I have a moment, I'll post some images. At some point, a render farm will come into play I know. Thanks again for the info.

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[C4D] General Discussion / Re: Is HDRI Lighting Generally Noisier?

« on: 2025-07-22, 18:49:26 »

Thanks for the info. In my case, I had a car with a studio look, but black and white, so what I should have done is use the image for reflections and place more Corona lights around. I will compare and post back for others to learn.

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[C4D] I need help! / Re: Render Object with Transparent Shadow

« on: 2025-07-22, 18:46:59 »

Hey thank Maru for the refresher course. I will give this a try and post back.

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[C4D] General Discussion / Is HDRI Lighting Generally Noisier?

« on: 2025-07-21, 17:45:01 »

Was wondering if, in general, lighting a scene with and HDRI introduces more noise than traditional Corona lights or Sky/Sun lighting?

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[C4D] I need help! / Render Object with Transparent Shadow

« on: 2025-07-14, 16:39:14 »

I'm in the middle of my project now, but am pounding my head that I couldn't remember how I did this in the past. I have a car on an object which will eventually be placed over a still of that base object in Premiere. In the past, I figured out a way to export that car AND the shadow as one piece, RGBA sort of thing. The closest I was able to get before having to abandon ship and start rendering a separate pass for the shadows, is the vehicle with a shadow, but you can still see the form of the base object it is sitting on.

I apologize I can't post details or files yet, but wanted to put it out there. I put a Shadow Catcher Material on the base object and of course the setting inside there is where I'm sure I'm missing something, but I have tried multiple combinations of Environment/Sky Object/Compositing, Backplate/...... then I enable Multi-Pass and add Mask, Alpha, Shadows and anything else I can think of.

One question on Multi-Pass. If I enable a bunch of passes, does that add to render time, or is Corona rendering that info anyway and I'm just separate them?

Thanks for any tips.

--Alex

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[C4D] I need help! / Re: Controllable Shadow Catcher Spread

« on: 2025-05-22, 20:02:46 »

I do a lot of car renders. The shadow really depends on your lighting, as in real life. A sunny day creates crispy shadows. Cloudy day soft and diffuse. I do struggle sometimes to get what I think Corona will create, and then have to resort to the old workaround. Once you have got it so the shadows are the softness you need, I set up two Takes.

Take 1 with the car and Alpha. Important to get the glass to be somewhat transparent. The regular mask usually just gives you the shape of the car with opaque windows. Compositing Tag to hide the background from camera. Set up a render setting to save as Beauty or something. It's important to have your image that is used in the comp to provide reflections and a ground effect, but not show in the render.

Take 2 is HIDE car from the camera. Replace the ground with a large plane that has a bright white material. Important that your object touches, or in the case of car tires, I always have them slightly through the "floor." Another render setting and save as Shadows. This can be a simple JPG still or sequence.

Then in your video software or image editor, have the background image and then drop the shadow render in with the car on top. Change the Blending mode for the white shadow layer to Multiply. Boom. You can now reduce opacity or play with levels or curves just on the shadow layer. You can add a blur as well. Don't go crazy though with blurs as you will mess up the contact shadows. Ambient Occlusion as it's called in the standard C4D render engine.

One limitation to my workaround is if you some type of bumpy floor/ground or something that breaks the shadow up, this method will not provide that level of detail.

Hope this makes sense. It works for me. I set up a simple scene showing this.


https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/i37nen5bx6lkt8lzvd166/Shadow-Workaround.zip?rlkey=e4t6qvsfy4tj8bk67g8qmaw56&dl=0

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[C4D] General Discussion / C4D Not Warning About Missing Corona Textures?

« on: 2025-05-14, 20:06:49 »

I was looking for an older scene file and when I found it and opened the file, no warning or anything. This scene has 22 missing texture files. Not sure C4D even warns when opening, but I can hit render and it just tries to render. If the HDR is missing in the Sky Object, then it will mostly render just black unless there are other lights.

Is this a new thing, or am just not remembering this is how it has always worked? Yes, I know about the Project Asset Inspector, but it would be nice to know at least when I hit render. What if I hit render and walk away before first pixel (usually wait BTW)? Just wasted time. Anyway, just wondering about this.

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[C4D] Bug Reporting / Re: Team Renderer Issue with Corona Bitmap Shader in C4D 2025: Materials Not Display

« on: 2025-05-14, 19:03:29 »

Interesting. I had reported this Team Render issues a long time ago, maybe 4 or 5 years. Team Render behaves similar to Save with Assets. In my case, textures, at least from third party materials sets, when collected would change the name of the texture file to some random numeric name, but not the inside the path so they would all be missing from the render. In my case it was a material set from The Pixel Lab. I will try your workaround with a C4D node sitting in there.

For me, I haven't used Team Render in a long time, but this issue would be a problem if you want to use a render farm too.

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[C4D] Previews (Daily Builds) / Re: cxr_layers in Photoshop File

« on: 2025-05-13, 18:01:58 »

@sszyszka Not sure if this would help you now, but when using TeamRender in the past, I had to adjust the packet size I believe it was. Basically limiting how large the chunks of information C4D/Corona will send over the network at a time. I honestly to recall exactly how to do it and it may not fix your failed renders, but it just might. There is a thread of mine from a few years ago on this topic.

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[C4D] General Discussion / Re: How to get a nice glass sphere render?

« on: 2025-04-17, 21:29:46 »

This is a very tricky look to achieve. The A.i. did a good job of getting the feel of it. Unless you are animating or doing something else that REQUIRES you to get this look by just hitting render, then I'd think of it in pieces that you assemble in Photoshop or whatever. Here, I rendered out the glass ball with two lights and used architectural glass and I added a Fresnel effects to get the center to render mostly transparent with alpha.

I grabbed a simple gold ball of C4D's assets (uses a crazy looking normal map to get the dimples, but I'm guessing a proper mesh would give better results. I thine rendered the not-so-great ball and played with the layers in Photoshop. In the ballpark, but needs work. If it was me, I'd make the glass manually, and then render a ball with a warm and green light to try and get the look.

Maybe this will spur an idea.

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[C4D] General Discussion / Re: camera move

« on: 2025-04-08, 15:41:36 »

I didn't see a pontoon in your images so not familiar with that. The video I posted is not for tracking. The Camera Calibrator is just to match the C4D camera to the image to match perspective/focal length. This way, when you add the simple shapes for the camera to map the image onto, it will match everything. Yes, the Calibrator is also used in Camera Matching, but since your background is a still image, that would be unnecessary.

Everything I have posted is base on the background image being a still image. Is that the case?

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[C4D] General Discussion / Re: camera move

« on: 2025-04-05, 19:53:22 »

I'm not 100% sure I understand your problem, but I think you want the background image to react to the camera movement? If so, maybe try adding a flat plane with the same proportions as the background image. I usually make it a child of the camera and zero out the positions and rotations. Drag it out of the Camera and position it to fill up your screen and add that background image. Now when you move the camera closer, you will also get closer to the image.

Things to keep in mind. Your camera move can't be too dramatic since it's a flat image. Subtle is better here. You may need to move your image farther away from the camera to help control that. You will also have to scale it back up to fill the screen.

I'd probably add a Corona Compositing tag to make sure the background image doesn't block light and cast a shadow.

If you want to learn something really useful, not sure your level of C4D knowledge, learn about Camera Mapping. If you aren't familiar, it's the technique that is used when you only have a flat image or can afford to build a 3D version of the scene, so now you can make small 3D moves and the scene appears 3D. In your case, using simple objects like planes, cylinders and cubes, line them up with your image. I can't remember if you need to cut out the different shapes in Photoshop too. Using the Calibrate Camera, and Projection tag, it can magically transform your background into a 3D scene. Again, works best with smaller camera moves. I found this OLD C4D tutorial that seems pretty clear showing the process.

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[C4D] I need help! / Re: Cannot open the Cosmos Browser

« on: 2025-03-25, 17:48:41 »

That is a workaround a problem with the software, not really a solution. It does get you back online, but...

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[C4D] General Discussion / Re: Node Editor Functionality

« on: 2025-03-24, 18:56:50 »

I think one thing to remember is Corona can utilize Shared nodes/textures/materials. If you open only the one material, but it shares nodes with several other materials, and you change a property in that node. It would affect all the others you can't see. This might be a problem I'd imagine.

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[C4D] I need help! / Re: Cannot open the Cosmos Browser

« on: 2025-03-24, 18:51:59 »

I hope this long-standing, recurring issue is on the To-Do list to finally fix. I tend to avoid Cosmos updates until I have the to time wait for the "only seconds to update" which always take MUCH longer and then the "unable to open..." message. Then you have to re-install Cosmos. More and more assets are being moved to Cosmos, but we still have this issue and still many poorly converted materials as well.