Introduction
In the final part of this tutorial, I will introduce the basic idea of how to set up the lighting in our scene and render the image for a final
composition. When it comes to the rendering, it is always related to time, and you will discover that every object/light/shadow inside your scene
can cause different render times. To finish up at the end, we will composite our render in the post-production stage.
Different Methods to set up Lighting
You can find a detailed description in Maya’s help file for every type of light available in Maya; here I will introduce some basic methods of lighting setups for our scene.
3-Point Lights
If we don’t use an advanced lighting system,like Final Gather/Global Illumination, we’d usually set up a basic 3-point lighting system for a scene. A key light simulates our main light source, and a fill light/backlight helps to light up the dark area (Fig.01).
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| Fig.1 |
A. Depth Map Shadow
- In this 3-point lighting setup example, we use three spot lights for our scene. If we switch to the Attributes Editor of our spot light, the two key sections we are focusing on are Spot Light Attributes and Shadows. Inside Spot Light Attributes we have a Colour section, to control our light colour. If you click on the white colour box, a Colour Chooser menu will pop-up for us to select the colour we want. Let’s pick a warm color (H50, S0.14, V1) to simulate sunlight. The Cone Angle section allows us to control the size of the light, so let’s set it to 80. A higher value in the Penumbra Angle section can soften the edge of the light, so let’s enter a value of 8 here. The Dropoff value of 3 is to control the width of our light being cast on the scene. Go
- to the Shadows section, and in Maya there are two types of shadows provided: Depth Map and Ray Traced shadows. We’ll start by using the Depth Map Shadows for our scene, and in the Resolution section a higher value of Resolution will give us a higher quality of shadow (in multiples of 64); however, at the same time it will also increase the render time. First, let’s set it to 512, and the Filter size will allow us to smooth the edge of the shadow. For the Fill light and Backlight, the settings are almost the same; the only difference is that we don’t use shadows for both of these two lights, and the intensity will be set it to 0.1 for both of them (Fig.02).
Fig.2 - We can see the backlight is placed under the floor, and this will block out our backlight for the scene. To avoid this we can just break up the connection between the backlight and the floor. To do this, let’s select our backlight and the floor, go to the main menu and select Lighting Shading > Break Light Links; this will break up the connection between the two objects (Fig.03).
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Fig.3 - After the basic lights are set up, let’s create a camera (Create > Cameras > Camera), switch the view to our created camera inside our View port (Panels > Perspective > Camera1), and make our Resolution Gate (View > Camera Setting > Resolution Gate). This makes it easier to preview our render frame; we’ll move our camera angle by following our 2D concept image as reference. Once the camera is set up, lock the camera movement to avoid any unnecessary modifications. Under the Channels menu, with our camera selected, let’s select all the Translate XYZ/Rotate XYZ sections and right-click on any one of them. A menu will popup, in which we want to select Lock. From now we will no longer be able to move or rotate our camera (Fig.04).
- Coming now to the part of render settings, let’s click on the Render Setting icon at the top of our menu, and inside the Render Setting windows, let’s select Maya software as our render, and a preset Intermediate Quality under the Quality section (a higher number of shading samples provide less noise in the render quality, but this also causes longer render times). Under the Common section we’ll set our Image Size to 800x600 pixels (Fig.05). Coming now to the part of render settings, let’s click on the Render Setting icon at the top of our menu, and inside the Render Setting windows, let’s select Maya software as our render, and a preset Intermediate Quality under the Quality section (a higher number of shading samples provide less noise in the render quality, but this also causes longer render times). Under the Common section we’ll set our Image Size to 800x600 pixels (Fig.05).
Fig.5 - Once everything is set up, let’s click on the Render Current Frame icon (the second on the right of the Render Settings icon). From our render results (Fig.06 – Fig.08)
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Fig.7 
Fig.8
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| Fig.4 |
