The lecture commenced with learning about lighting & rendering, which was the next step of Owen’s 4 parts to 3D lectures. Primary, I established the Maya project by setting the project to a preferable
folder. I made the project window system of folders.
Lighting
Loading the example ‘bull statue’ scene, to set up the scene with some good lighting. Opened up
Arnold, drop-down menu, to access the Arnold lights (don’t use Maya lights) to make an area light
and viewing basic properties of the light. I looked into the area light properties of Exposure, Colour
temperature, Light Shape, Spread, Shadow Density/Colour and Camera.
I was told by Owen that it’s better to change the Exposure of the light instead of the intensity,
Exposure is a f-stop value that helps by multiplying the intensity to get a stronger outcome of light.
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The colour temperature of the area light changes how cold (blue tint) or warm (Red tint) the light looks.
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An area light has 3 different types of shapes (quad, cylinder, disk), and these shapes change how the light is projected outwards. Area light has a certain property in the visibility section called a camera, and the camera lets the light be seen in the renderer.
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The spread property of a light adjusts how the light is directed out, at the most spread a light is 180° angle but when the spread is more directed to an acute angle.
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Shadow Density changes the amount of darkness that is made behind an object in the scene and the shadow’s colour can also be changed to different hues (as seen in the blue shadow).
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Renderview Alpha
In the Arnold renderview, there is a button to change the view between Red, Green, Blue, Hue,
Saturation, Brightness, and Alpha.
Simple Area Light
Here is an image I saved in the lecture from when I used an Area Light to create this simple light
system.
After creating the simple area light scene, Owen showed a lighting guide for photography, where we
can replicate these lightings in 3D.
In the lecture, I created the lighting set-up for the Coloured Gels (as it looked cool, out of all the light
systems on the guide). I had to recreate the coloured gels - a lighting system on the bull statue model to
practice lighting a scene.
Now I investigated into a new editor in the toolbar at the top under Windows > Rendering Editors >
Light Editor. The Light Editor lists all the light in the scene accompanied by attributes commonly used
for each light. This light editor will help me to organise each light for the Coloured Gels system.
For the Coloured Gels lighting set-up, I needed 4 individual strobe lights (White, Red, Blue, and Purple).
So, using the basic area light from earlier, I changed its properties to be the white strobe light in the
coloured gels example but I had to create the 3 other lights. Hence, I had to arrange the light in the right
place, I used the Look Through Light Tool (which looks like a torch with an eye over the top) so that the
light could pivot around (but I had to focus the light on the statue with the focus tool [F Keyboard Button]) the statue than eyeballing the position in the perspective view.
I found that fascinating (to me) accidentally created a new Area Light when I moved the light through
the statue's head, the Through Light Camera picked up this cool look inside of the model.
Accordingly, placing all four area lights and changing their properties to create this groovy
Coloured Gels effect on the scene.
Coloured Gel Light Effect (Version 1)
The decent thing about having a light editor is that individually the lights can have each property edited (e.g., the red light changed to green) to create different lighting effects.
Coloured Gel Light Effect (Green Light V2)
After a few variations to the properties of the Coloured Gels light system, I came up with the finished
light set-up.
Coloured Gel Light Effect (Version 3)
After learning the Arnold Area Lights system, we went over Light Filters to generate blockers to
obstruct the light from a model inside the blocker box. Let’s reduce the light in a certain area by
having the light selected to go into the Attribute Editor and scroll down to Light Filters. Add
aiLightBlocker, in the Outliner a new item called transform1 with appear. Select the new item and
Move (W)/Scale (R) the volume around the object that is needed.
In the Attribute Editor, adjusted the Density under Light Blocker Attributes so the eyes are not lit up
by the light.
Light Blocker: Density at 1.000
After learning these techniques with Owen, I noticed that the Coloured Gels Lighting System had a Silver Reflector.
I wanted to find out how to create such a photography item in the 3D environment (Maya). When
figuring it out by decided to build a polygon disk and apply a chrome texture consequently the light
could bounce off the reflector to develop a new effect.
There was a drawback with the reflector which was the reflector could be seen in the render which I
didn’t want, as it ruined the overall look. Therefore, asking Owen, we determined a way of hiding the
reflector from the renderview by selecting the reflector, inside the Attribute Editor (of the object),
there is an Arnold dropdown and under the dropdown, there’s visibility (Primary Visibility). The
Primary Visibility hide the polygon from the rendered image.
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The image below shows the effect the reflection made.
Reflector (Chrome Material)
Camera & Rendering
Once I was happy with the lighting I needed to focus on the render. Now I need to set up the camera
by turning on the Safe Action to give me a guideline of what would be in the renderview. The minute
I positioned the perspective view in the optimal observation for a camera. When I found the best
view for the camera, in the viewport toolbar (View> Create Camera from View [CTRL + Shift + C]) to
use the view to place a camera in that position.
Importantly, the new camera was required to be renamed in the Outliner to Renderable_Camera, and then the camera had to be locked in the viewport, so it wasn’t accidentally moved. If the viewport
needs moving I can change the camera in the panel drop-down to select the Persp camera to go back
to the Perspective view.
I selected the camera and went into the Attribute Editor to scroll down to the Arnold dropdown to
open it up.
From here I had to adjust the focal distance, by checking the Enable DOF box.
I was required to discover how far the object was from the camera, to do it at the top toolbar
(Display>Heads Up Display>Object Details, the viewport should not have the text at the top right of
the viewport), when the object is selected it should automatically show the Distance From Camera.
In the Outliner click the Renderable_Camera, to access the Attribute Editor where under the Arnold tab
adjust the Focus Distance to how far the object is from the camera. At that moment, adjust the
Aperture Size to around 0.100 to give the columns in the background some blur (hence to get the Bull to
stand out against the background).
Light Blocker: Density at -1.000
As a final point, I needed to advance the quality as the render originates noise. Thus, turn on the Render Menu Set to go Render>Render Setting in the toolbar at the top. In here all the adjustments to the
quality can be made to the render.
Adjustments to the file formats are made in the Common tab to the frame ranges for an animated
sequence, the camera that is being rendered from and the image size. For this project, the image size
had to be modified to the Presets to HD_1080.
Render Sampling: Camera (AA) at 2 [With Noise]
Contained in the Arnold Renderer tab adjustments to increase quality can be made, the sampling had to replicate the figures below and allowed Arnold to Render the image. The image size and sampling increased the render time significantly, slowing the computer down. At the bottom of the renderview, it
analyses the time the image took to render 1 frame according to the approximate timeframe can be
calculated as how long it would take to render an entire animation of a bunch of frames.
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Render Sampling: Camera (AA) at 4 [Increased Quality Sample]
In the lecture, I learned Lighting & Rendering techniques in Maya to enable a professional aesthetic scene of the end product.
I really enjoyed the aspect of this tutorial because it was easier to comprehend what I needed to do
from the guidance and understanding.
Knowing the lighting & rendering techniques helps my project because I can light the
campsite project with a night atmosphere to render the scene for animation and receive a great quality.
So, after modelling items for the campsite, I’ll need to find the right lighting set-up for the
environment. I want my campsite environment to be dark but with the moon glowing down on
the land with the glow of the fire bouncing off the characters' faces.
