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• Lighting > Understanding Lights in Maya - Part 3 (Posted By: Aziz)
• :: Post Date: 2008-09-26 16:53:34 [Post Comment] [Post Articles]

• Understanding Lights in Maya - Part 3 Software: Maya Author: Aziz Contact: aziz3d(at)clubsrk(dot)com Hi guys and welcome to part 3 of Understanding Lights In Maya. In this tutorial, we will work with Area Light and the last light in the list Volume Light. Ok let's get started. Area Light 1 - As usual we will create a light, this time an Area light. 2 - Place it somewhere in the scene where you would like it. 3 - Now activate the Use Ray Trace Shadows. 4 - Hit render. You should have something like the image below and as you can see, the shadows are too grainy so we will fix this issue next by increasing the Shadow Ray and the Ray Depth Limit. 5 - Now in the light attributes, increase Shadow Ray and the Ray Depth Limit accordingly to fit your needs, and then open Render Settings by going to Window>>Rendering Editors>>Render Settings. Expand Raytracing tab and crank up the values as seen in the image. 6 - Select the light and then go to its attributes once again, and now expand the (Mental ray) tab, make sure your rendering engine is set to Mental Ray and Global illumination is on in the Render Settings. Now you should see a couple of different options like Use Light Shape and Emit Photons. Use Light Shape = you can change the shape of your light to Disk, Sphere, Cylinder and User, so go with any shape you like. Emit Photons = Photons are basically small points which cause indirect illumination in the scene and keep bouncing from one object to another until they die. 7 - Ok first we will start working with Light Shape, duplicate your object in the scene and give it a bit of distance. 8 - Open up Hypershade. 9 - In Hypershade create a Surface Shader and it will appear in your work area. Now select your duplicated object, right click on the newly create Surface Shader material from popup list and choose Assign Material To Selection. 10 - Still in Hypershade, double-click on Surface Shader and the material attributes editor will popup. Adjust the settings to fit what you see in the image below. 11 - Then hit render and you should have something like below. 12 - Ok select your light and in the Light Shape, choose anything you like according to your object in the scene. In this case, I am going to choose Sphere since I am already dealing with a sphere. Scale the light to fit your object and change your settings to match what you can see in the image below. 13 - Once again hit render. As you can see, the image is too dark -- why is this? Because our object is receiving and casting Shadows which is why it's too dark. 14 - Ok let's work on the problem. Select the object and open up Attributes Editor -- in the pSphereShape2 and in polySurfaceShape1 uncheck Cast Shadows and Receive Shadows. This is appropriate in my case, however if you are using different objects, this could be different. 15 - Now select the light and crank up its intensity to something like 3 or 4 according to the size of your scene. 16 - Now hit render and this time you should see a different result then before. 17 - Open up your Render Settings and check Final Gathering...in Scale, click on the color Chip and then crank the values as indicated in the image below. 18 - In the final render for Light Shapes, I've create a cylinder and created another Area Light, changed its shape to cylinder and fixed it to object. Here we are done with Light Shape, let's get working with Photons, here is the end scene which you can download at the end of this tutorial. 19 - Ok let's start working with Photons. If you have your own scene, you are welcome to play but if you don't, then you are more than welcomed to play with the scene I've provided. You'll find the file available for download at the end of the tutorial (Area Light - scene files). In this case, we are going to illuminate an interior scene. Ok create an Area light and then fix it to the windows of you room. 20 - Select the area light and open Attributes Editor, set the intensity to 0 and then check Emit Photons with default values. 21 - In the Render Settings, set your render to mental ray, check Global Illumination and then crank up the values for Ray Tracing. 22 - In Global Illum Photons, crank the values as seen below or according to the limit of your computer resources because by increasing values, you will have slow feedback while rendering. So keep the values somewhere around medium happy, this setting only works if you turn on Global Illumination in the render Settings. 23 - With all these settings, let's hit render -- the image is blotchy and in some parts it's washed out. 24 - Play with Photon Intensity. 25 - Hit render again, as you can see it's a bit better then before. 26 - Turn on Final gathering in Render Settings and hit render again. Now we have a really nice looking result compared to the first two, in the exercise part of these tutorials, I will show you how to light up an interior scene using this technique. The image is a bit jagged because I forgot to crank up Anti-Aliasing values. Here we conclude with area light -- next we will start working with our last light on the list, Volume Light. Volume Light Ok let's start working with Volume Light. 1 - Create the light. 2 - Place it in the scene. 3 - Scale it to cover the scene. 4 - Hit render and you will see very dark result. Let's work on it. 5 - Crank the intensity to 5 or 6, Light Shape is set to Sphere, set the Interpolation to Smooth, Volume Light Dir set to outward means that the light will cast outward pretty straight forward. Arc is the angle of your light 360 is full, 180 half and so on. Color Range = basically it's casting two different light colors, starting from white to black. 6 - Also, check Use Ray Trace Shadows. 7 - Hit render -- now it's looking nice but a bit dark. 8 - Crank up the intensity a bit and then change the Colors. 9- Hit render -- looks nice but still a bit dark. 10 - In the Render Settings, check Final Gathering and crank the filter value to 1. 11 - Here is the final render and it's looking much better than before. Congratulations guys, you've successfully completed the lights tutorial. In the next part of this tutorial series, we will learn how to light up an interior scene with nifty looking sunlight casting from windows to inside of a room. This concludes the third part of the tutorials, I hope you've enjoyed doing them. If you still have any comments, feedback, suggestions, or questions, please feel free to write me at: aziz3d(at)clubsrk(dot)com. Scene Files: Area Light - scene files Volume Light - scene file Other Parts of Tutorials: Understanding Lights in Maya - Part 1 Understanding Lights in Maya - Part 2 Understanding Lights in Maya - Part 4

• Comments: (Currently there are 1 comments.)
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• • [Anonymous]elan ( 2009-04-27 13:07:03 ) [Post Comments]

  • awsome, very beautyfull works i like this very much and will give 100% mark for this lighting from my side great job buddy

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