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WEEK ONE : Introduction
In week one, we get started with the lighting tools, controls and key concepts.
- Introduction to Maya Lights and Lighting Design:
- Maya Spotlight Parameters
- Aiming and Controlling Spotlights
- High Quality Realtime Shading
- Barndoors
- Cookies
- Light Linking
- Illuminates by Default option
- Uses of Light Linking
- Simulated Radiosity Lighting and Bounce Lights
- Decay Rate and Falloff Curves
- Vocabulary of Lighting Design
- Shading Components
- Direct vs. Indirect Light
- Names and Functions of Lights:
- Key
- Fill
- Rim
- Kick
- Bounce
- Practical
- Specular
- Motivation and Cheating
Assignments: Light Basic Room with spot lights as seen in demo, match-lighting orange scene as seen in demo.
WEEK TWO : Shadows and Additional Lighting Options.
In week two, we focus on shadows, from basic options and controls to advanced cheats and refinements, and explore the pros and cons and special features of different light types in Maya.
- Raytraced Shadows
- Using Raytraced Shadows
- Soft Shadows from a Spot Light
- Trace Depth and Ray Depth Limit
- Raytracing Behind The Scenes
- Depth Map Shadows
- Interactive Previewing of Shadows
- Dmap Framing and Resolution
- Memory Use
- Approaches to Soft Shadows
- Shadow Artifacts and Light Leaks
- Dmap Bias
- Blocker Geometry
- Fur Shadowing
- Transparency Support
- Maya Light Types
- Point Lights
- Point Lights and Depth Maps
- Spot vs. Point Lights
- Ambient Lights
- Directional Lights
- Area Lights
- Volume Lights
- Volume Lights for Distance Falloff
- Emitting Ambient
- Negative Lighting
- Shoot-Out
- Raytrace vs. Dmap Comparison Chart
- Cheats and Tricks
- Shadows-only lights
- Shadow objects
- Light Linking and Shadow Linking
- Illuminates by Default
- Shadows Obey Light Linking
- Shadow Linking
- Mental Ray Shadow Options
- Mental Ray Area Light Option
- Shadow Samples for MR Depth Maps
- Detail Shadow Maps
Assignment: Light Kitchen Scene with demonstrated lighting techniques
WEEK THREE : Occlusion and Passes.
In week three we begin using occlusion, explore the Mental Ray ambient occlusion texture and its options, and start using Maya’s Render Layers to render occlusion passes.
- Ambient Occlusion & Render Layer Basics
- Ambient Occlusion Texture
- Occlusion Passes
- Intro to Render Passes
- Maya Render Layers
- Creating Layers
- Shader Adjustments
- Parameter Overrides
- Shader Overrides
- Layer Overrides
- Lighting Layers
- Occlusion Pass Set-up
- Occlusion Parameters
- Samples
- Max Distance
- Spread
- Falloff
- Compositing Render Layers
- Multiplying Occlusion into Fill Light
- Linear Dodge (Add)
- Glows and Blooms
Assignment: Light Kitchen Scene in Render Layers, including Occlusion Pass.
WEEK FOUR : Global Illumination.
Global Illumination can produce results that range from beautifully believable to slow, frustrating, and confusing. In week four, we’ll try talk about workflows to get your GI more on the beautiful and believable side.
- Photon Mapped GI
- Final Gathering
- Color Bleeding
- Shader-Based Adjustments to GI
- GI Set Lighting Strategies
- GI Passes and Breakdowns
Assignments: Light Cornell Box as in demo, Re-Light Kitchen Scene, use GI and FG this time, submit break-down
WEEK FIVE : Global Illumination continued.
There’s more to Global Illumination, and this week we go deeper and explore other options and refinements you can use.
- Caustics
- Caustics vs. regular GI Photons
- Refractive Caustics
- Caustics and Shadow Transparency
- Object-Based Lighting
- Image Based Lighting (IBL)
- Panoramas and Reflection Environments
- Working with HDRI
- Fixing GI Problems
Assignments: Create Caustics for Still Life, improve Kitchen for bonus points.
WEEK SIX : Materials, Shaders and Textures
Shaders and textures are an integral part of your rendering. This week we explore how shaders and textures can be developed that work well with your lighting and rendering.
- Maya Common Shader Parameters
- Variation in other common shader types
- Displacement Quality and Tessellation Controls
- Texture Mapping
- Projecting Textures
- Implicit and Explicit UVs
- Assigning and Editing Uvs
- 2D and 3D Textures
- Alignment Strategies
- Creating Tiling Maps
- Equalizing Tones in Maps
- Layering and Combining Textures
- Hypershade
- Creating looks by combining textures
- Combining Shaders
- Fun with Shader Trees
- Fresnel Effect Ways to create it
Assignment: Texture and Light Still Life
WEEK SEVEN : Final Output Settings.
Modern lighting and rendering grows out of the art of cinematography and photography, so this week we’ll be talking about cameras, and how concepts from real cameras and photography apply in 3D.
- Camera Artifacts
- Optical Effects
- Lens Distortion
- Chromatic Aberrations
- Flares
- Glows
- Depth of Field
- How it works in real cameras
- Rendering with DOF
- Faking DOF
- Motion Blur
- How it works in real cameras
- Rendering with Motion Blur
- Digital Color
- Color Spaces
- Digital vs. Analog colors
- Digital Color Mixing
- Continuous Spectrum Rendering Issues
- Chromatic Aberrations
- Color Depth
- Mental Ray Frame Buffer Attributes
- HDRI Rendering and Compositing
- Anti-Aliasing
- Oversampling
- Adaptive Oversampling
- Filtering
- Filter Types
Assignment: Improve Still Life with Camera Artifacts
WEEK EIGHT : More with Render Passes
Most professional work is rendered in more than one pass or layer, and composited together for a refined and controllable result. In our final week, we will work more with Maya’s Render Layers, explore how to set-up your own types of render passes, and look at the process and math of a convincing composite.
- Built-in Pass Types
- Beauty
- Shadow
- Diffuse
- Specular
- Color
- Global Illumination
- Compositing Techniques
- Testing Render Passes
- Post-Processing Images
- Alternative Techniques:
- Tri-color shadow passes
- Extracting Reflection Passes
- Cast Occlusion Passes
- Final Gather Occlusion
- Fake Reflection Passes
- Approaches to Render Layers and Passes
- Pre-multiplied vs. Straight Alpha Channels
Assignment: Split Still Life into additional passes
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Level of Ability
This is an intermediate level course. You should not be a beginner in Maya. At minimum, you should have some familiarity with Maya already, even if you haven’t worked much with lights yet. For people in higher skill levels, this course should also help you if you have worked with lighting and rendering in Maya before, but want to improve your professional skills, pick up a few more tips, and see some other approaches to crafting professional looking images
Hardware and Software Requirements
Students will need to have Maya Complete or Maya Unlimited to participate in this class. Maya 7 to 8.5 while Maya 2008 is preferred. Both come with the Mental Ray renderer that Jeremy will be using for this class.
Students should also have Photoshop or similar as Jeremy will be putting together render layers and preparing some maps for his class.
A broadband connection will be needed for downloading the weekly video lessons.
Other Requirements
Although not a requirement, it may be useful for students to have a separate compositing program such as Shake, Combustion, After Effects, Digital Fusion, etc. as Jeremy will be including some examples in his chosen compositing program.
Students need to be familiar with web navigation and browsing, as well as email
Students need to be familiar with using a bulletin board system (such as CGTalk.com) as well as how to upload attachments to postings for review.
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