V-RayforC4D - Basic Startup (Part1) - Basix

Hello everybody and welcome the this new series of basic tutorials for V-Ray for Cinema 4D , this series of tutorials is re-make of the old non-english tutorials and aimed at new users to get them started using V-Ray for Cinema 4D . please note that V-Ray is a constant development plugin and therefore these tutorials are going to be constantly updated to correct , adapt , or rewritten the suit the latest VRay releases . in this first article we are going to be using V-Ray 1.2.6 and Cinema 4D R13 .

Firstly , Congratulations on choosing one of the best high-end render engines on the market for Cinema 4D , its beautifully integrated and you can start rendering realistic images almost immediately . with (very) fast GI for both flicker free animations and Still renders

What is V-Ray ?

V-Ray is a render engine that extends your 3D Software in the rendering field by providing advanced ray tracing technologies and other specific features , its available today for the most advanced 3D packages including Cinema 4D by The V-RayforC4D Team . and its originally developed by ChaosGroup .

The Main V-RayforC4D Features

• Global Illumination
• V-Ray lights
• Physical Camera
• Physical BRDF material
• Fast Render Proxies
• Sup-surface scattering
• Volume scattering
• Full Cinema 4D shader integration

and many other features . one of the biggest advantages of V-Ray for Cinema 4D is that ts also a multi platform plugin ( works on mac os and windows ) . We are going to start simple in this first tutorial by locating its main features in Cinema 4D , such as lights , gi , physical cameras , etc

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Rendering with V-RayforC4D

To Set your renderer to V-Ray , open the Render Settings Menu and Change it from Standard to VRayBridge .

normally when deciding on moving to the rendering part, we must have a final working project file with geometry and modeled or animated objects , for the purposes of this tutorial and other tutorials , we are going to be working with this simple demo file , you can download it using the link below . after you open it , you will notice its pretty much empty except for the objects .

Click Here To Download The Tutorial Files

we will start simple by setting a basic clay render to get an idea of what we are going to be working with before we do any shading or lighting , to do that , it’s best if we use the fastest way of lightning , using the default environment color along with GI and Ambient Occlusion

To do that , go to your render settings and find the Gi tap under VrayBridge . and then set the the GI to ON

Next to the ON option , you will notice that there are a good number of presets , its best to start by the Default 00A preset , its the fastest and will give an ok result for the start . Of course you can see that there are a number of settings and options for the GI settings , as we are writing this tutorial , we tried to keep it simple as possible and discuss the settings more in depth in separate tutorials

Now if we hit render you will get a render result like in the image below , this could be a good way to see draft result of your project . if you wanted to improve your clay render , try using better irradiance map/light cash render settings with a reinhard color mapping and gamma 2.2 .

Here are the steps to make you render a little bit better with different color mapping and gamma 2.2 settings

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Lightning With V-RayforC4D

Now that we have a basic idea of where to start , its time to explore some of essential things for every project such as lights , physical camera and materials .

To Create a V-Ray light , we need to assign a V-Ray light tag to any standard light that we have in our scene , the light tag then will override the default settings with its own VRay parameters , using the tag we can switch between light types and do other things as well . and the current VRay will support 5 types of lights that we can combine to simulate actual real life lights , the Area Light (or V-Ray Light Plane) is perhaps the most common one to use in most situations .We can also turn any polygonal objects into a light emitter using the V-Ray materials as well

Lets illuminate our studio like scene here using V-Ray Area lights , in our demo we are using area lights because they are the closet to actually studios lights such as softboxes and umbrellas . lets start be making a basic 3-Point light setup . we will add A key Light , a Fill Light , and Rim or back Light

There are a number of variations for this type of lightning and its really matter of taste for where you set the lights , we will start by adding our Key light only to the Right side of the camera in our scene , from the light menu Create an area light and add a target tag to it and set a null as a target .

its recommended that you rename everything to make things easy to find

Now position our key light and change its dimensions a more realistic scale in our scene

Now that we have positioned our Key light , its time to add a VRay Light tag to it , and by default the tag will adapt out light dimensions and will have a good result without adjusting any of the tag settings

And as we are not making a fast clay render anymore , lets make one more change and that is to set our environment color to black so it doesn’t add any illumination to our scene .

Render the image now , and you should get a result like this one

We will continue to make this render better by adding our Fill and and back light by following the same steps with the same light target

Before we render this image , there is One more thing we should keep in mind and that is all real lights have falloff , and our V-Ray lights at this moment are not acting as real physical lights , to change that we have to turn OFF our No decay option under the Area Light settings

You’ll probably notice something in the viewport now is that we can see the falloff spheres ( lines ) around our objects , those are only there by default for Cinema 4D because the falloff type have changed , but they have no effect in the render time as V-Ray uses a more accurate falloff . you can adjust them however to make your viewport better for now .

We prefer to turn on the Photometric Intensity option ( under the area light options > Photometric ) it also has no effect in the render time and keeps the viewport cleaner

if you render the image after you turn off the no decay option , you will notice that our image is under exposed and not as bright as we wanted it to be . Here the Physical Camera comes in Handy , lets assign a Physical Camera tag to our camera and adjust our white balance and exposure settings ( you can of course change the lights intensity but its easier to control the exposure than only focus on individuals lights )

Our final studio lights look very nice and we have a decent result so far . before we move to the materials part , lets take a quick look at the other light type that are available to us with V-Ray . and perhaps one of the most common light type is the V-Ray Physical Sun and Sky , it provides natural and a physical sky to our scene .

To create a V-Ray Physical Sky , we need switch the light type to Infinite and then enable the Physical Sun under the Sun light tab

Other light types can vary from IES to HDRI lights , and we are going to explore them more in detail in the upcoming tutorials .

This Tutorial ends here and its the first part of the series , we will learn more about the V-Ray materials and Physical Camera in the Next Tutorial , if you have any questions , you can leave a comment below .

Basix Tutorial Tip : always keep your project on a real world scale , even if it was stylized types of animation projects , you will get better and a lot more accurate results when rendering with V-Ray or any other engines .

V-RayforC4D Basic Startup (Part2) – Basix