You have your product or title object beautifully modeled and textured…but what about lighting?  Well, one short answer is to look into Global Illumination.  Another option fake GI with a complex lighting scheme.  There are many options out there, here is one.  We’re going to use MoGraph to make the setup a little easier and more flexible.

Step 01
Make a Sphere object to use as our guide for the lighting dome.  Under the Sphere Object Attributes we are going to make two changes.  First, make the sphere Radius BIG!  Second, make the sphere Type: Hemisphere.

Rename the Sphere “Dome” and make it not visible it in the Viewer.

Step 02
Make our light, a Spot Light.  This light is going to be multiplied lots and lots of times later with a Cloner Object, so we will set it’s Intensity very low.  We also need to change the Color to a 50% neutral gray (I’ll explain why later).  We also want some nice Soft Shadows.

Step 03
With the light selected, go to the MoGraph menu and while holding down the alt/option key create a Cloner Object.

SIDE-TIP: When creating a new object, holding down the alt/option key makes the new object a parent of whatever you have selected.

With the Cloner Object still selected, we need to change its Mode to Object.

Step 04
Next drag our Dome object from the Object List and drop it into the Cloner’s Attribute Manager in the Object dialog box.

Step 05
Since we had our light selected and we held down the alt/option key while creating the Cloner Object, it was created as the parent of the Light. This is exactly what we want, except the lights are pointed the opposite way we wanted.

Back to the Attribute Manager for the Cloner Object.  Under the Transform tab we want to change the Pitch Rotation 180 degrees to turn the lights around so that they all point at our main object.

If you do a quick test render, you’ll find that things are looking pretty good.  But let’s take it a step further.

Let’s take a second to think about light in real life.  Light color is Additive.  That is, if you add lots of lights of different colors, when they shine on the same object, all of the color will add together and create white light.  So we’re going to use a Random Effector to try to recreate this effect by setting all of the light colors to random colors.

Step 06
With your Cloner Object still selected, go to the Mograph menu and add a Random Effector.

In the Attribute Manager for the Cloner Object, let’s disable the default On values for Position, Scale and Rotation.

Next, we’ll go down to Color Mode and set it to On. And change the Blending Mode to Add.  (this is why we changed the Spotlight Color to a neutral gray…if you Add anything to white you get white, useless)

Now we have a bunch of lights, all different colors, pointing at our main object.

Step 07
With this setup we get a pretty good shot.

The only thing we’re missing is some pretty reflections. So we will go up and create a Sky Object and texture it with your favorite HDRI map. (for more info on this see my last tutorial “Creating a Chrome Metal with Great Reflections using a Sky Object and HDRI”

So here’s our final render, side-by-side with a GI render of the same scene.  A little different, true, but not bad considering that GI renders are really time consuming compared to our dome lighting setup.

Global Illumination

Dome Lighting

WHY MoGraph you ask?  Well, since we used a Cloner Object, we can continue to make changes to ALL of our lights by changing our ONE set of light controls.  You can also change the size of our lighting dome at any time by modifying our Dome Object.

Filed under: Tutorials, 3D, C4d, Lighting, MoGraph, Tutorial