HDR Light Studio 8 brings Scrim Lights to Cinema 4D The latest release adds an easy-to-use way to create advanced scrim lighting effects like a professional photographer.

Scrim Lighting is a technique used by professional photographers in the studio to light products, jewelry, and even cars. A Scrim Light combines a sheet of translucent material, called a scrim, with a separate light source illuminating the scrim from behind. The front of the scrim emits a nice diffuse lighting effect, similar to a softbox.

You can use any light source to light the scrim (softbox, spotlight, strip light) and move the light relative to the scrim to control the lighting effect physically. Using this method - you gain a huge amount of control over the appearance and lighting effect created. You can create wonderful graduations of light. This is why photographers love using scrim lights.

The Scrim Light in HDR Light Studio 8 models the interaction of the light behind the scrim and the result is an HDR texture that is used on a light on the HDRI map or an Area Light. As you make changes in HDR Light Studio, HDR textures are updated in Cinema 4D, so you can see the lighting result update live on your interactive render.

The scrim light source is easily positioned behind the scrim using the interactive top and front views of the scrim setup. Keyboard shortcuts let the user change UI modes to manipulate the light position, scale, rotation, and spread.

Because this is a physical lighting effect, moving the light further away softens the lighting effect. Moving the light closer to the scrim creates a smaller and brighter lighting effect. It's liberating to control the appearance of lighting in real-time intuitively and physically - just like a photographer in the studio.

HDR Light Studio 8 ships with a wide range of Preset Scrim Light designs that can be applied to your lights and adjusted.

Gradient on area light/emitter
A common approach 3D artists use to fake a scrim light-type effect in Cinema 4D is to use a gradient on an area light. But it takes time and experimentation to build a convincing gradient, and this will never capture the nuances and rich character of a real light source interacting with a scrim. Furthermore, editing and refining the gradient is also time-consuming.

3D modeled scrim light setup
You can model a scrim light setup in Cinema 4D. But it's very challenging, impossible in many renderers, to set up a shader on the scrim surface that can be backlit using a light and emit light from the front. Even if this setup is possible, it would take a very long time to render a clean result with all of those interactions of light.

Light card front lit with hidden light
An alternative that creates an effect similar to a scrim, is to front light an opaque white light panel using a non-visible light source. This would mean that all of your main illumination would be coming from bounced light in your renderer. So again this would take longer to render a clean result than a direct light source. Also, positioning the light source in 3D relative to the light panel would take a lot of trial and error to get the exact scrim light effect you want.

HDR Light Studio 8 is out now and is compatible with Cinema 4D R25, S26, and 2023 supporting Cinema 4D Physical renderer, Redshift, V-Ray, Octane, Arnold, and Corona. HDR Light Studio 8 also includes plug-ins for other leading 3D software.

The Cinema 4D plug-in is included with HDR Light Studio 'Indie, Pro, and Automotive' licenses. HDR Light Studio 8 is available now to try for free and to buy from www.lightmap.co.uk.