[big K]

hello inge,

welcome to the forum!

now to your questions (i was hoping someone with a little more experience in the enviroment setup to reply, but ...)
anyway, for question number one you need to use MXI/HDRI background maps. you have 4 types you can chose: pure background, reflection, refraction, illumination.
i haven´t found where to setup this in cinema. it should be under the sky tab in the settings object. (where you choose between physical sky and sky dome. there should be an option with HDRI/MXI, which is not)
you can do this in studio though.

question number two: to get faster renderings (which is not really fast as we are talking about unbiased rendering) there are some tips and tricks.
-first of all use low poly counts for your emitters.
-the more light the less noise - outdoor images clear up much faster. but this also aplies to studio setups.
-it used to be very important to set the color values of the materials not above 224 for R,G or B, but i think this is less important with 1.1. (but still good to get realistic materials

hope this helps for the moment,
there is still much more info in the forum, so do some search on this

cheers
michael

[dyarza]

i haven´t found where to setup this in cinema. it should be under the sky tab in the settings object. (where you choose between physical sky and sky dome. there should be an option with HDRI/MXI, which is not)
you can do this in studio though.

Create a C4D sky object and a new material. In the C4D material the texture maps as follows:

C4D --> M~R
============
Color = Background
Luminance = Illumination
Transparency = Refraction
Reflection = Reflection

Map your background image to the desired channels and assign the material to the sky object, then add a M~R Sky Map tag to the sky object. You can use this in conjunction with physical sunlight.

[big K]

dyarza:

thanks for the description. now i am sure i have read this somewhere before. but couldn´t find it.

inge:

this depends what you are up to. for a "normal outdoor" lighting the phys sky and enabled sunlight are sufficient. no extra lights needed.


cheers
michael