EAlexander

Don't know if it is "exclusively" made in c4d, but I believe Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs is mostly C4d driven.

Its so subjective and there are hardware realities to consider as well. I've started looking at render engines like Cameras. Some people like to shoot on Canon, some like to shoot on Nikon, some prefer...... I think less about tests of seconds but which one feels better and is more instinctive to me. Corona is this hands down for me - easily the easiest render engine I've ever learned and great images right out of the box. But I don't do animations, or heavy vfx, or characters, so it's going to be so different for everybody and I don't pretend to think it's the best solution for anyone else. Without the render wars, though, we would still be yelling at random strangers online about mac vs. PC, pepsi vs. Coke, or the z-brush interface.

You could exclude the floor from the area light so it doesn't light it or show its reflections. Then you could build a secondary lighting system just for the floor that excludes the car. This way you can have control over both.

Yes, this is great. Never heard of that site before - thanks for letting us know. e.

My all time favorite, not Cinema, but well related, is Carey Smith of Division05. https://youtube.com/c/Division05

I'm saying Sketchup.....

Nice! I agree with Cerbera's notes. I think you can kill the webcam while modeling. One thing that people also ways ask me for in my tutorials is to have keystrokes appear on screen. I used to use a little Mac app called Mousepose for this, but now that I'm mostly windows, I haven't looked for an app yet, but I'm sure there are tons of options. Can be helpful to see shortcuts as you use them. Looking forward to the series! e.

Ha - yes, hardware certainly isn't your issue then. Also - try a pass with RS set to medium or even high and see what the difference is and what the time change is. Maybe high is good enough. Good luck.

So much of this comes down to how well your scene and geometry is optimized and your hardware specs, not just the lighting. So it's hard to troubleshoot time questions remotely - for example - is that Medicine shop made up of hundreds and hundreds of separate objects? Is your gpu 8 years old? My suggestion is to try rendering a frame with the volumetric haze off: what does this do to your render time? What if you have a few smaller uplights for haze instead of one big massive one - does that help render time? Are there 8K textures on some random prop/dressing item that is far from camera? Try to isolate things and see if you can track down what is costing the most time and is it worth it or can it be optimized. There is no easy fix other then playing and learning about optimization and what and how your specific hardware and GPU performs.

Holy hell Dave - that is a lot of speculation there. Are you aware that Vectorworks, Nemetschek's flagship product, does not have the subscription model that Cinema 4d does?

Lots of good advice in here already. I also try to think about what is happening in the house behind the camera? What does this kitchen butt up against - a living room with lots of windows? A small hallway? While your big window is the motivational driver for the lighting (and I really agree with Everfresh here on the intensity and overall darkness/contrast) - there would be light coming at it from the camera side too. That might be another window we can't see, overhead lighting or lamps, or even just bounce off a near by wall. So think about that a bit to balance it out. Don't be afraid to look at other renders or photos to try and emulate lighting - see attached. Keep going! This is how we learn.