Let There be Light

Cinema 4D offers a complete array of gaffer's tools so you can make your scene outshine the competition. Global Illumination now included!

Light up your scenes with Cinema 4D's lighting system and produce outstanding results in little time with the built-in render engine.

Lighting

Various types of light and shadow calculations provide the basis for an extraordinarily powerful lighting system. Control color, brightness, falloff and other properties and adjust density and color of each light's shadows. You also can use Lumen or Candela brightness values for any light rather than using abstract percentage values. Create visible or volumetric lights with noise patterns that appear in the light cone. Lights offer settings such as contrast, lens reflexes, shadow color, volumetric light and noise, and many more.

Rendering

Cinema 4D's outstanding renderer delivers great-looking results in short time thanks to its linear workflow, support for multiple processors, HyperThreading and Multi-Core technology.

With Cinema 4D's Multi-Pass rendering you can easily render color, shadow, reflection and other effects to individual files for tweaking using your favorite compositing application. Multiple object-based alpha channels make it easy to layer elements with other 2D and 3D assets. With direct export to Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Nuke, Shake, Fusion and Motion, your Multi-Pass layers will be ready to composite in no time. Cinema 4D supports rendering in 16-bit and 32-bit color depth for high dynamics range images in DPX, HDRI or OpenEXR format.

Furthermore, the support of color profiles makes sure your renderings appear as they should, no matter which device you're working with.

Global Illumination

Achieve greater rendering realism with Global Illumination, which provides a more accurate representation of scene lighting by taking into account light that bounces between objects. The Global Illumination engine can also utilize an HDRI-based sky for outstanding image-based illumination.

Stereoscopy

Create eye-popping stereo 3D visuals using the complete stereoscopic workflow in Cinema 4D Release 13. Easily convert existing projects or create new stereo scenes using a few simple camera settings, and preview the stereo effect within the Viewport. Render the merged image or individual channels and preview the stereo effect within Cinema 4D’s Picture Viewer.

Stereo Camera and Rendering

A few simple settings convert any Cinema 4D camera into a stereo rig. Simply enable one of the stereo modes, define the eye-separation and convergence, and choose between parallel, off-axis, on-axis or radial placement. Safe regions can be defined manually or defined automatically by Cinema 4D. 

Real-time Stereo Display

Preview stereo effects in real-time by enabling the Stereoscopic mode for any view. Stereo previews can be displayed in Anaglyph, Side-by-Side, Interlaced or Active Shutter mode for compatibility with a variety of 3D monitors, projectors and glasses.