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Maya Fundamentals Tutorials

What is Rendering? / Lighting a Scene to Create Atmosphere




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Subtitles of the Movie

I am going to use a light that I created in another segment - the segment on creating lights and setting attributes for the light. I’m going to select the light that I've created, open the attribute editor, preview this light. It’s a blue light and was designed to reflect the idea of moonlight shining in through a window. The shadow color (I’ll double click on the swatch for the shadow color to open up the shadow color window), is a warm color, a deep dark warm color to compliment the blue color of the light. Open the attribute editor again – I’m going to add a texture to the light to help create an atmosphere. I am going to open up the light effects tab, go to lightFog, and click on the checker board button - that's going to open up a new dialog box for the lightFog via the color window. I am going to click on the checker board button and that's going to open up the texture maps, goes to the create render node - by default it goes to textures. I am going to select a cloud texture. I'll open up the attribute editor for the light again. I am going to go to the top panel and I am going to change the panel from the render view to the hypershade. In the hypershade I am going to find the lightFog shader, and I am going middle mouse click and drag the shader to the work area in the hypershade - there's my lightFog shader. I am going to click on the show up and downstream connections button. I am going to open the attribute editor for the light fog - I am going to turn the density down to .3, center. I am going to select the cloud render node and open up the attribute editor for cloud render node, and turn down the light and dark attributes of the cloud. Now I am going to close the attribute editor – for the cloud I am going to go back to the render view in my panels. I am going to rearrange my view in perspective window, so that I can clearly see the lightFog and I am going to render the lightFog - render, render perspective. This will take a moment - there's our render. Unfortunately due to the 256 color display our representation of renders is rather poor with the video. Render it with your own computer and you should see a much more effective look to the lightFog. You can see how this cove describes the lightFog area that it is effecting on the light.

Tutorial Information

Course: Maya Fundamentals
Author: Chuck Grieb
SKU: 33402
ISBN: 1932072136
Release Date: 2002-12-05
Duration: 7 hrs / 106 lessons
Captions: For Online University members only
Compatibility: Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux
QuickTime 7, Flash 8

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