Lights

Vray for C4D will produce awesome real world lighting for your scenes and animations. Vray seems to be by far the fastest ray tracer, GI renderer and seems to handle with ease high quality options such as blurry reflections / refractions, DOF, 3d motion blur and displacements. Just as important as the camera settings are the light settings. After adding a Vray light tag to your light, you will now control the different types of settings from within the Vray light tag tabs in the attribute manager and not the regular CINEMA 4D light settings. Remember that they work in conjunction with the camera and it´s settings to produce different lighting effects. There are tabs for controlling the settings of an Area Light, a Spotlight, the Vray Sunlight and IES Lights. Using an infinite light and controlling the settings from within the Vray Sunlight tab can produce a wonderful sky and atmosphere which will spill light into your room through windows. By moving your light outside of your interior room and checking Physical Sun and Physical Sky, then checking Enable Shadows under the Common tab, you can easily set up your scene´s lighting. More settings can be found under the Vray Sun tag to control turbidity, ozone and water vapor. plus settings to adjust the intensity and size multipliers.

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As an example, for the room with the divider, I have used the settings listed below.

IES or photometric lights are a simple method which will allow you to add realism to your renders by allowing you to use lamp light, track lighting, wall lights and more. You can readily find free IES files for different types of lighting on various websites. By inserting these IES files into the attribute manager when using a Vray Omni light you can create beautiful indoor lighting.

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As an example of IES lighting, in the image with the couch and lamp, I have used the settings below:

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Vray is adept at rendering specular highlights and giving a clear crisp render to items such as jewelry and precious gems. In the diamond render one very important aspect was the settings in the render tab for antialiasing which you will find in your render settings. In order to be sharp and without any artifacts, the type was set to Adaptive DMC and the filter was enabled and set to SincLanczos. The light and camera settings for the diamond ring render are thus:

Likewise, a spotlight can be used. In the domino image I used a target spot with a cone angle of 30 degrees and a penumbra angle of 45 degrees. Intensity was set at 778.908 and the cutoff threshold was 0.005. Camera settings were f-stop 8, Shutter speed 25, and ISO 550.

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As you can see, not only do the light settings affect the image, but the camera settings work in conjunction with the lights to create the type, intensity and overall look and feel of how the lighting affects your scene. Just as in real life, these settings are very important to the overall quality of your scene.

Animation

Animations can be rendered very easily in Vray for C4D. In order to save rendering time it is wise to render out first your irradiance maps by setting the mode to Animation Prepass in your Irradiance Map Mode under the GI render settings and set the save path to where you would like the images to go. Also enable Don´t render final Image in your options tab. This will save out a numbered series of irradiance images that you will then use in your second render. In the second render set the mode to Animation Render and direct it to the files you have previously saved and uncheck Don´t render final Image. Make sure that you use a good antialiasing subdivision and you are ready to go.