Getting Started

Hi everyone and welcome to my nerdy little blog,
nutriman here - some might know me from the C4D Forums.

Here you'll find an in depth look at Cinema4D's Global Illumination Rendersettings and their optimization (Currently R11.5).
We're going to focus on QMC, IR and QMC in combination with IR. The Skysampler might be touched but not covered in depth as the other methods.
Prepare for some thorough research, we're going to cover all settings that influence the GI Calculation:
Rendersettings, lights, geometry, tags etc.
Later we're also going to have a look at materials and GI in Animation.
Usually you would need a lot of different scenes to gather experience and to have some sort of knowledge how to optimize quality/ rendertime.
This is where my nifty little testscene comes into play:


The scene controller enables you to quickly change the scenario.
Different scenarios require different settings and I tried to cover everything critical to GI calculation within this one scene.

If you want to follow along practically or tweak settings for yourself you can download my GI-Testscene here
Attention, this scene is 11.5 format and makes use of Mograph as well as Mocca so make sure you have those in order to have the controllers fully working!

Feel free to make suggestions but remember it's not about aesthetics this time but about GI critical elements (like shadow definition).
Also note that most of the values can be turned up more than the slider reveals.

Spare yourself days of testrendering and still get a feeling for the settings beyond the presets.
Hopefully this will enable you to make the most out of the renderengine in terms of speed/ quality.
It's all about finding the right balance ;-)

If the conclusions made here will be applicable for "real" scenes will be examined later.

Before we start I'll post some useful Links...