Review - LightGen by Thomas Pasieka

LightGen

Review by Thomas Pasieka

Well what do we have here this time? Aplugin called “LightGen”. That alone should tell us that this plugin deals with “Light”. Actually it’s a plugin which can either fake global illumination or give you the option to render some nice looking light streak effects.

Now let’s have a look at the specs here. LightGen can be used on any primitive object and even on splines. The lights can be colored by any channel shader, either bitmap or procedural. Lights placed on a spline can be colored by a gradient or a channel shader, which is very easy to do within CINEMA4D.

So let’s say you have an object and you want to render it without using radiosity/global illumination, but you want the same look. Use LightGen to achieve a good looking result. Ihave tested both (Global Illumination/Radiosity and LightGen) to see which one is actually faster. I have to say that the render times vary a lot since everything heavily depends on your settings. It’s the same with C4D’s own radiosity - you will need to fine tune settings in order to get a good looking result. If you want a fast render then you will have to scale down your settings which leads to artifacts. So speedwise it’s up to the artist. If you want great results...it will take time. It’s the same with everything else.

There is one thing Ireally like about LightGen, it will produce flicker free animations (see example animation within the goodies folder). Iused a skydome with 121 light sources and soft shadows for a 6 second spin around animation. The rendering took 40 minutes, which wasn’t too bad for this size (faster computer will of course give better rendertimes).

The setup is pretty easy. Once installed you will see the plugin within your plugin menu. Just select the plugin, add a big sphere that surrounds your models and use a lightsource with minimum settings (I used 2-3%). Once you make the sphere and the lightsource a child of the LightGen plugin, the lights will be placed on each point of the sphere. There is also an option to get rid of point/lights that are below the level of your scene and that don’t need light. This saves rendertime. If you go to http://www.biomekk.com/lightgen.php you will get some information about this plugin and some examples files.

The plugin itself is not expensive at all, just $10! You can of course also get the free version which is missing some functions, but Iwould recommend buying this nifty little plugin. You won’t regret it. It’s actually not easy to give this plugin a final rating. As mentioned before, the speed depends on settings just like using radiosity. Maybe we can see a faster version of this plugin in the near future?

Iwould recommend having a look at the example files in our goodies folder, plus have a look at the Biomekk website to see what this plugin can do for you. If you like what you see, then make sure to support it by buying this plugin for only $10!

Now to my final thoughts; LightGen is a great idea and a good way to simulate GI, but Iwould like to see a speedboost if possible. Iwill give this plugin a 4out of5 for it’s ease of use, documentation and sample files that come with this very inexpensive little helper.

Visit: http://www.biomekk.com/ for more information and other plugins.