Welcome! My name is Konstantin Magnus and this is a tutorial on how to create flicker-free animations using physical sky and global illumination in Cinema 4D for rendering a day-to-night time-lapse.
Before we start modeling our room, we should set up a new scene, File New, and go to Mode, Project and change the default object color to 80% gray.
That way everything will look neutral in its color.
Next, create a cube, call it Room, and set its size to 6 by 240 by 4 meters.
And go to Display, Goro Shading Line so we can see the segmentation better.
Next, I choose 15 segments in X and 10 in Z so that way we have a square shape on top.
And I use 3 segments in height so I have a row for the windows later on.
Next, I choose half the height of the object and put it into the position Y, so that's 120.
And now we convert the box and select the polygons using Select Loop and set the size to 160.
We leave the first polygon out on the wider side and choose 3, leave out 2, choose 3 polygons, leave out 2 and choose 3 again.
Right click Extrude and set it to 40.
Next, right click and say Extrude Inner, use an offset of 5 and don't preserve any groups so that you get little windows.
Extrude again, this time we just offset it by 5 and press Delete.
Here we have some windows.
On the back side we just leave 5 polygons empty, choose 5 and leave 5 empty.
Hold down Shift and get the bottom pieces that belong to the others.
Hit Right, Extrude and Extrude it by 80.
Now delete those polygons and we're done modeling our room.
If you want to make it perfect, press Command A to select all polygons, right click and just say Reverse Normals,
so the original normals, the good sides of the polygons are inside the room.
Next, you try to find a nice perspective, go to Model mode and create a camera.
Dive inside the camera by clicking on the cross and set the rotation P to 0 to have a straight view.
The height can be 120 or 1 of the camera and now we just go a bit closer.
We should also set the focal length to 50mm.
I don't mind the borders to have some foreground, that's rather good.
Next we go to the Render settings and set the output to 1280 by 720 and click on Lock Ratio, so we have a little HD resolution.
Now I want to have those two windows in my frame and I go out a little with the camera
and I want to have an animation of 150 frames in total.
We start off here with the camera, I just want to save down the position, so I hit Record, go to the very last frame,
drive my camera forward until I'm about here, so I still see the floor and press on the key again.
That would be my animation, really really slow going inside the room.
Next I create a little sculpture which is 1 by 40 by 1 and I set it to a height of 20, so you can see this structure and I move it over by 80 units.
Next I use a sphere, give it a radius of 30 or rather 40, pull it up by 80 units, move it over by 80 units and this should be my sculpture.
So we can now still see the sculpture touching the bottom here which is good for checking if the global illumination is working good later on.
Next we set up a physical sky which will be our only light source.
The physical sky is delivering two lights, maybe we can see them here.
What we see at first is the blueish light which is rather diffused, that's the daylight and the sun is also to be seen here in the foreground with a warmer color.
So first of all let's set the time to March 16th, so the sun comes in rather in a flat angle and we start off early in the morning at 5.30.
On frame 0 we should save this time down and on the very last frame we should be at half past 8 but not in the morning but rather in the evening.
The same day and click on record. Now what we get is an animation with the sun going up and down.
Let's see what the morning looks like and we can tell that everything comes from the wrong side so what we could do is rotating the sky so it just starts at another place or we just rotate everything we have in the foreground.
So let's choose a null, put in everything and rotate the null by 180 degrees.
So now the sun comes from the left side and when we render we see it just comes in here then it goes down on the other side I hope.
Perfect. If you had the sun on the right side you don't need this null object for turning around everything but I had to because I started off the wrong way.
And now I choose a midday frame to really make this whole thing look realistic I want to use global illumination. Global illumination can be set on the render settings effects, global illumination and for animation we need a QMC as a primary method
and radiosity maps with gives us one bouncing back for the light one ray is bouncing back.
And the samples can be set to 100% accuracy which will take a while but has not much noise in there anymore.
The good thing about QMC is that it doesn't create any flickering. The radiosity maps should have a sky sampling on 32 and in case you're using area lights which I don't do then you have to enable area sampling as well.
In the cache files we don't need to change anything and under options you can disable refractive caustics.
Now if we define the physical sky a little better we should set up the intensities for the sky to 300% and the sun to 300% intensity.
And to get the image brighter overall you set the gamma in the render settings to 1.4 as well.
So now you can do a little test rendering. Don't be surprised it takes a little while but it will look flicker free in the end.
Now the only thing we have to do to get an animation out of this is to set untilizing to best 2x2 on max level.
Disable this multi pass and save it as a sequence of PNG files. Using 8-bit is okay I'd say and you choose just a folder on your desktop or wherever.
And yeah we can simulate that, call it movie and just write down room sun underscore something and it will just iterate like 0 0 0 0 0 1 and so on.
And apart from that you should go to output and just say you want all frames from 0 to 250. After that all you have to do is click on the render to picture viewer and it will take depending on your machine it will take quite a while.
Maybe 2 minutes per frame if you're fast. Maybe a lot more.
