Subtitles of the Movie

We're now going to take a look at some of the basics of lighting in Maya. The most basic light type is called point light. So in this scene I'm going to go up to Create, Lights, Point Light, and this will use the default settings. I have just created a small object that is a point light icon, and the most benefit can be had by switching into first from wire frame, which is 4 on the keyboard to Shaded mode with 5, and then I'm going to press 7, and this gives me what's called Hardware lighting, so I'm getting a more accurate representation of the lights in the scene rather than just a generic default light. So you can see as I'm moving this point light around the scene, I have an area of influence where it's brightest. I'm going to set this up above a little bit now and take a look at some of the attributes on this light that we can adjust. I'm going to open up the Attribute Editor and we can get here either by using the menu under Window, Attribute Editor or a common shortcut for this is Control A. That'll bring up the Attribute Editor for my point light. And I'll zoom back a little bit so that we can see both the scene and my Attribute Editor. The first thing I'm going to look at here is color, and this works very similarly to the material settings that we looked at in the Lambert shader. So I can slide the color value from black up through white, or I can click on that swatch and bring up a little wheel, and this allows me to tint the light to warm it up a little bit, or cool it. You can also go to extreme effects, like putting a gel in front of a light. So I'll put a little cool light on here and accept that color. Hand in hand with the color settings are the intensity settings. You can see that as I introduced color into the color slot, the scene darkened up a bit, so if I want to brighten that up, I can increase the value of this intensity, and this acts like a dimmer switch on a light bulb, increasing that brightness. We're dropping it down. So I'm going to set this back up to the default value of one, and that's where we're going to leave the point light. One thing I will mention at this point not only can I animate the position of that light just like we animated the ball drop earlier; we set key frames for that over time, but it's also possible to key frame almost any attribute that you see in the Attribute Editor for an object. So for example, if I want to brighten this light over time I can start off with something lower, let's say, point 5, and with the light selected, I can press S to set a key frame. See back here that position of that light got keyed, and now I also want to set key frame on this intensity value. I can either do this by dragging down to that channel just like we did earlier, right click and choose key selected, or if you're working inside of the Attribute Editor, you can right click on an individual attribute and set the key there. Okay, so on frame one, this is the position of the light and the brightness, and now let's move to frame 24 and I will move that light over and increase its brightness. So I'm going to, again, set a key frame for the position by pressing S and set a key frame for intensity by right clicking and choosing Set Key. If I move this out of the way a little bit and start dragging the time slider, you can see the effect I get of the moving bulb and the increase in brightness. Press Play, see that moving through the scene.