Cinema4D Light Dome
Hi everyone and welcome to helloluxx, the new home of my blog.
As a thank you for all the continued support, I’ve created a Light Dome scene that you can download for use in your own Cinema4D scenes. You will need MoGraph to use the setup and I created it using Cinema4D r11.5, but it should work fine in r11, and maybe even 10.5.
Light Dome - Basic Render Result
The Light Dome is fairly straight forward to use. Here’s a screenshot of the available parameters.
Light Dome Parameters
I’ve also created a short tutorial that gives you a quick overview of the controls. You can check this out on Vimeo.
Light Dome Introduction from Tim Clapham on Vimeo.
Download the Cinema4D Light Dome scene as a zip file here.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Topher, Motionworks. Motionworks said: CINEMA 4D | Hypa closes, Luxx opens, and we all benefit from another Tim Clapham C4D tutorial and preset: http://bit.ly/88gUWQ [...]
Very cool Tim!!!
Thanks for that scene file and good luck for your new company!
Very nice and very handy set up.
Thanks for sharing.
Regards
-regis
Thanks to be sharing always as much wisdom and to show creative ways to us in this constant to evolve of 3D
Hi Tim
Thanks for the Light Dome! Good luck with your new venture.
Nice..! Thank you very much
Good luck with your new company and thanks for keeping up with your nice and well explained tutorials.
Sweet!!! Sorry to hear about HYPA, but I’m sure you’ll be bigger and better in the future.
Hello HelloLuxx,
Thanks Tim for all you do to help us.
Congrats!
Best,
J
Excellent website for users on the more technical side of Cinema 4D! I wanted to use a light dome a few days ago but since i use release 10 there are no plug ins available anymore for this
there was Lumen which was quite a good plug in, and for a really simple dome you could use place on points on a half sphere!
Cheers for the light dome Tim.
Really nice tool. Thanks for sharing this Tim.
helloluxx FTW!
[...] and with it a new blog, helloluxx. All the old archives were moved over and there is already a new tutorial & scene file for [...]
This is really awesome! Thank you so much, man!! ^^_ Congrats!!
Hi, Tim
Your Lightdome is very useful and impressive, I use it a lot. I have one question for you?, I want to generate only a shadow from one light, not for all, is it this possible by means the plugin. Thanks in advance !
Hi
You can switch shadows off in the light dome and then add a new light in your scene and use that for casting the shadow.
cheers
Tim
Thans for all Tim, I try this …
Hey Tim,
Thanks for sharing! I was having some major issues with GI render times and was able to accomplish a similar effect with the light dome at much reduced render times.
I did run into one issue and was wondering if you had experienced it as well? It occurs when casting shadows from the light dome using shadow maps. The shadows/lights (not sure which) appear to flicker when rendering an animation. Here’s a demo with the light dome casting shadow maps onto a grid of cubes: http://reformationstudios.com/files/2010/01/lightdome-shadow-maps-flicker.c4d
If you render about thirty frames, you should notice flickering. It doesn’t happen with area shadows. Any idea what the issue might be?
I found the problem. I had made the geometry of the light dome visible and forgot to turn it back off when rendering. I’m guessing that since the lights are sitting on the surface of the dome, the C4D renderer ‘jitters’ between clipping and not clipping the lights with the surface of the sphere…
WoW Amazing light setup !
I have thought about it a lot. Maybe if you make a dome capable to “read” 50 – 60 color’s information of an HDRI image, it would look much better, because a gradient is not that realistic.
So it’ll be the same principle. It will create 60 lamps around the scene but instead of connecting a gradient node, you connect an HDR images, and it juste pick the color at this point, and cast the same color whit the lamps created !
What do you think about it ?
Leo
It should work with the current setup, just swap the texture linked to an hdri rather than the gradient material. Increase the segments and adjust the brightness accordingly.
Ok, thank you, I’ll try !
Hey Tim!
Really nice setup! I made something similar in the past but not as thorough as you did.
I expanded the Xpresso to be able to sample textures (e.g. HDRIs) for some IBL goodness and would like to share if anyone is interested.
Of course I’ll do this only if you’re cool with that, cause after all it’s your brainchild.
Cheers,
Jo
Hi Jo,
The setup already uses a texture for the light colour, so adding an image instead will work no problem at all, as you have already discovered by the sound of things. I have no problem with you sharing the file, as long as you credit me and keep a link to the helloluxx blog.
Thanks
Tim
i really liked your light dome but no matter how i use it i cannot overcome the flickering. have you been able to solve this problem?
thanks
altug
I don’t have a problem with flickering, do you have the sphere that the lights are cloned onto visible for rendering?
Tim:
Love the lightdome! I have used it for a great number of stills and animations, and have some beautiful results. I seem to have little to no problems with flickering–if I do, I usually adjust materials and shading (especially any filteres/shaders where I have flipped the UV coords.) and that takes care of it (but of course resolution may be a factor).
Further, I just wanted to say that any and all tutorials you have done are of immeasurable value to me. I have only been working with/studying C4D for about 6 months, and have learned a great deal in that period, but my knowledge curve inevitably spikes when I work through your instructionals. [And I believe I am in a large majority in this opinion… a few weeks ago I read somebody’s post discussing you (I think it might have been on a site/thread discussing or in connection with FXPHD). He made the statement that you have “a frightening amount of knowledge” as it pertains to both CG and C4D. I would firmly second that.
I do have one quick question regarding the lightdome….
I am currently trying to render a still. The scene is difficult to light in the manner I wish as it is quite deep along Z (and GI would take days). I have used your lightdome extensively and especially love the color gradient feature, and it would be perfect if I could use it to light this scene. Question: would the lightdome (or rather any Xpresso functionality contained within) break if I made the dome editable and elongated same along Z? I didn’t want to try it as it is set up as a preset in a specific way with a icon, etc. and would prefer no to reinstall. I appreciate any response….(unfortunately, I have only scratched the surface with respect to Xpresso, or I think I would be able to resolve this on my own).
Hi Paul
Thanks for your message and kind words.
I’m not sure of the advantage to stretching the dome along one axis, but you should be able to just stretch the sphere using the object tool. After all the setup is simply an array of lights that are cloned across the spheres vertices.
However my suggestion would be to add extra lights into the scene. I use the light dome myself, but I will 99% of the time add in additional key and fill lights.
thanks
Tim