Cineversity

Hello,

I’m using C4D 14, and wondering when using Physical Sky (Create->Physical Sky) whether it is possible to control the color of the shadows. I like the overall quality of the light on the objects in my scene, but the shadows are unnaturally saturated with color. I’d love to turn that saturation down without changing the illumination on my objects (saturation correction in the Sky tab reduces the illumination saturation, as well). Is that possible?

Thanks, Michael

Hi Michael,

There is certainly a threshold of what fits to a scene or not, as well what is considered natural or CGish (black shadows for example).

However, if the “self-shadow” area of an object is just “neutral dark gray”—more or less, (see screenshot) and the resulting floor shadow a strong saturated bluish tone, things become unacceptable in most cases ;o)

My suggestion, try the tab Attribute Manager>Sky>Saturation Correction for a quick fix. (see screenshot, R14)

Quick means here, perhaps nice to a certain degree.

For high-quality work, I like to use shadow passes as “masks” for the correction, either in Ae as Adjustment Layer, or as channel in a compositing app, such as NUKE.

With the mask approach you can adjust the quality of a shadow in many ways, and I believe all of them are needed to make something useful, exposure/brightness, saturation and tint. I hope that I’m not too abstract here, if you need more detail, let me know. (I have discussed shadows qualities in that way in my JET making of)

All the best

Sassi

P.S.: to change the Attribute Manager>Sun>Shadow color/density is not advised from my side at all, as it might lead in some cases to “transparent object aesthetics”.

Thanks very much for the reply, Sassi. You’re right, it’s hard to imagine those strongly saturated blue shadows (exactly what I was getting) being useful for hardly anything (and so, perhaps a strange design choice for Physical Sky?)...

And I agree, the saturation correction is limited (it seems to effect the illumination in addition to the shadows).

Great idea for the shadow passes—that’s what I’m going to explore now.

Thanks again!, Michael

Thanks a lot for the feedback, Michael.

I hope you enjoy the options of this workflow. :o)

Have a great weekend

Sassi