Physical sky in Cinema 4D

Levente Varga
Jan 15, 2021
2 min read

before I started to play around with the physical sky in C4D (Cinema 4D), I wanted to get a few rendered images of what basic single point lighting looked like.

Image one:

In the first image only a single light was used and a blue texture on the floor panel so it would be easily distinguishable between the two objects.

image two:

for the second render I played around with some settings and made the some of the light bounce back from the floor panel and create a very slight blue tint on the sphere.

In both these images you can tell something is very obviously missing, and that is shadows of the sphere on the floor panel. Because the shadows are missing all together, the sphere looks like it's floating above the floor or completely detached from the scene. Basically creating a very weird and unrealistic.

First using and playing around with settings:

Just as an indication as to where to find the physical sky in C4D.

When I first inserted the basic physical sky I could immediately see that the problem with shadows was fixed (This did take some tweaking in the render settings menu)

In the rendering menu, I changed the rendering type from standard to physical and added a global illumination effect from the effects menu which helped make the shadow more apparent.

Once I had these settings sorted a started to test out what some of the settings within the physical sky actually did. The hue changed the types of colour that were picked up in the background. A hue of 66% resulted in a pinky-purple colour in the background.

Another setting I tested was turbidity which made the background darker and created a much warmer orange gradient on the sphere. This could be useful to recreate scenes trying to present a 'golden hour' effect. (As I found out later there is an easier way of doing this as you can set the time of where the 'sun' would be located.)

final renders using the physical sky:

Image one: