With his animation "Light is just fine now", Marc Potocnik, Designer and Director of the animation studio renderbaron, has captured the fleetingness of everyday lighting situations to moving pixels. Marc has shared a comprehensive breakdown of how he achieved photorealism – with an unusual approach.
Light Is Just Fine Now is a free animation work I created with Cinema 4D and Redshift. It is about the fascination and fleetingness of everyday light situations. A worn-out living room in early spring flooded with light, two people talking, and street noises in the background. You can watch it on renderbarons' website.
If the scene looks familiar and you don't know why – the animation is based on a scene I created as a test scene for Maxon Cinebench.
Contemplating on light – that is also how I created the lighting for this work: photorealism is achieved only by using roughly a dozen manually placed lights, and that's (almost) it. There is no Global Illumination here. But as GI is almost free in Redshift, why on Earth would anyone do this?
For my free works, I use only manually set light and thus Direct Illumination, as this approach is kind of a passion of mine. This manual workflow lets you dive deep into the visual mechanisms of direct and indirect light the most. Combined with the efficient and elegant use of as few light sources as possible, it's an excellent lighting exercise. Yes, it sounds vintage – but hey, do you know any other artist achieving this level of realistic lighting without GI? I'll take any challenge.
Let's have a look behind the scenes. All assets and textures are custom-made. This, of course, also applies to shaders, be it the fuzzy fabric covering of the sofa (seen at 00:08), the worn wood veneer for the table (00:16), or the procedural marble look on the laminate of the windowsill (00:32).
However, as the name of the animation "Light Is Just Fine Now" suggests – the most important part of realism here is the light. A convincing balance of direct and indirect light is crucial to a photorealistic impression. So let's take a look at how this is achieved here step by step:
A photorealistic impression is not only achieved by diffuse and specular reflections: caustic artifacts from refraction and reflection are also an important part. So let's check how caustics are created here:
After lighting and caustics, there are two cheap tricks that can help with brightening up shadows that might appear too dark:
And that's it. Especially the last two steps give our scene a slightly flat impression but are rendered with 16-bit depth – that's exactly what we want in Compositing, as this gives us enough headroom for sufficient gradation correction without causing banding.
Well-crafted lighting, convincing assets, and textures create a realistic impression. But the movement, compositing with optical imperfections, and a corresponding sound complement this to real photorealism:
Compositing was done in After Effects. There I turned the slightly flat look of the raw 16-bit rendering into a photographic impression by increasing contrast and introducing optical artifacts such as Motion Blur, Glow, Chromatic Aberration, and slight animated focus shifts. Making it imperfect is making it convincing.
The animation was created and rendered using an HP Z840 workstation with 128 GB RAM and an MSI 3090 Suprim X GPU with 24 GB VRAM. The render times per frame were about 7 minutes for the total shot and 50-60 minutes in UltraCloseUp on the candle.
These differences come from the different proportions of expensive calculations in the image. In the total shot soft diffuse light and multiple rough reflections are already apparent, but the closer the camera gets, the greater the proportion of these and other highly complex effects gets.
This becomes especially apparent in the ultra close-up of the candle: here, widely scattered SubSurface Scattering dominates and is derived from multiply refracted and reflected light – in noise-free quality. As denoisers tend to blur the finest details, a correspondingly high number of samples is the only way to go here. But I think this was worth it.
See a making-of on the animation at renderbarons' YouTube channel:
As I am a Cinema 4D Master Trainer you can learn Redshift in my studio renderbaron – onsite and online. The scene Light Is Just Fine Now is included in the training (of course also with Global Illumination) as one of many practice projects. Check out my training courses here.
Marc Potocnik is a graduate designer (FH) and owner of the animation studio renderbaron in Düsseldorf/ Germany. Since 2001, renderbaron is crafting high-quality 3D animations for renowned customers such as ZDF, Intel, Siemens, and others.
As Maxon Authorized Training Center (ATC) renderbaron offers trainings on Cinema 4D & Redshift. Marc Potocnik is Cinema 4D Master Trainer and also shares his knowledge by giving lectures at international industry events such as Siggraph, FMX, IBC, etc.
You can learn more about the studio by visiting its Facebook page, YouTube channel, and official website.