How Do I increase GI in renders?

[pali_rao]

Do I have to add in another light into the scene to do this, or is there another way to increase the GI within the scene?

I have very shiny objects, so don't want the reflections from it to appear in the render

Many thanks

[sirio76]

Can you post an image that shows the problem and what you are trying to achieve?

[pali_rao]

Thanks for the quick reply - sure - there are two issues I have - please see in the attached image (a section of the knight and a dragon). Im lighting with an HDRI (on the texture of a VRay dome light).

Apologies if these are obvious - Im very used to Vray within a Modo environment, but am new to C4D.

In the attached image:

+ The shadows are very dark - I've realised that I can increase the intensity of the luminance on the HDRI within the dome light - is this the best way?

+ There are another two additional lights - one in the dragons mouth, and one on the ground, uplighting the dragons belly (where fire will be composited) - These create very blocky either totally black or lit areas on the dragon, there is no realistic gradually shading.
Do I need to alter the lights in some way? (they are standard globe lights with default settings)

+ I've imported the meshes into C4D as OBJ's and put each OBJ in a subdivision surface node, but they do not seem to be subdivided at all in any Vray renders (preview of final). Do I need to also enable subdivision in the vray geometry tag for subs to work in renders?

Many thanks!

[sirio76]

First of all welcome to Vray for Cinema4D, I know Vray for Modo is not available anymore and I fill you have made a good choice with C4D!
As said in the other thread try to delete the normal tag on your imported object, let me know if this solve the problem, you can also try to optimize the mesh just to be sure the polygons are connected. In general you can simply use the Cinema4D subdivision surfaces, the geometry tag should be used mostly for displacement.
About the lighting, in real world you do not alter the intensity of the sky (provided your hdr is calibrated), you rise the camera exposure, and if you want to lit specific part of the scene you can use simple area lights to simulate softbox, spotlight, flashlight etc.
Once the lighting is decent you can still tune it interactively using the lightmix and don’t forget to play with tone-mapping inside the VFB.

[pali_rao]

Nice one thank you! Great to know that C4D is a good choice - Once Im up to speed, Im sure it will all flow!

Thank for the info - I'll keep the subdivision to the other thread.

Im using HDRI's from HDRIhaven, and they have always worked fine with Modo, so Im assuming they're all correctly calibrated. I'll play about with the camera settings and heck out the VFB tone mapping.

Thank you!

[sirio76]

The HDR from poly heaven are not necessarily calibrated, you may want to tune the intensity so that it will work with other photometric intensities and/or correct physical camera exposure.

[pali_rao]

Great ok - that's good to know.