PLEEEASE Help me I Know theres someone out there

[ASWDesign]

www.digitaltutors.com

Buy there Mental Ray DVD...

The best thing you could do is do HDRI on all of the reflective materials (DR has a free tutorial on how todo it in detail) also he has done some FOR which you can easly learn how todo but its diffrent if your doing it rendering it MR you have to do it with MR materials that a tutorial that easyly found :)

www.google.com its your friend

ASW

P.S Serch CG talk for threads with more insight

[chyv1083]

I have already looked into that option but for starters i have no money and i dont have alot of time left. I just need a few tips on outdoor lighting like early morning at a beach for example. I have been searching for some links but the most i find arent that helpful. Just let me know if you can help. PM me. Thanks

[Abe_killer]

have u tried to use the final gather rendering? simple to use and if u add a few lights with photon emitted options, u might get something very nice...?

[chaoticbob]

Warning: I'm no lighting expert...and still learning...

Judging from the photograph here's what I would do...:

Does your scene have a background image on it? If it does you can use
that as a starting point on trying to match up your lighting.

If you're using HDRI - is any part of the HDRI going to be visible. If it isn't,
then you can find an HDR image that has similar characteristics of the light
that you're trying to achieve, it doesn't have to be dead on. Even in the reflections
if there's not an abundant amount of reflection, you can get away with
having just enouhg to make it look convincing.

So assuming that you're going to be using HDRI, I would first turn on final gather
and get a good estimation of how the diffuse light affects the scene and tweak
it to match up with the background. At this point, I would worry about the
shadows just yet. Getting the overall feel of the light for the scene is will give
room to tweak the shadows later on.

To back up a little bit, the first thing I'd probably do is make a distinction between
the specular and diffuse elements of the scene. For the most part, everything in the
physical world has both. But it's not both is going to be completely visible or noticeable
in a rendering.

Using either phong or blinn with final gather with HDRI will produce a good reflection model
and maybe some soft shadows in your scene. You're going to want to tweak the final gather settings in Mental Ray to fit your scene, if you don't, it will kill you in render time.

Again if you're using a background, make sure the color offset effects the models close
to the same way real light affects the background.

Once you get the mood right for the scene, I would use spot lights and maybe point lights
to light the models where appropriate and to cast shadows. There are several different ways to combine GI and Final Gather. What I've found useful in some scenarios, espcially
out doors, is to make the light shadow only. The other thing I've done is to make seperate GI and Caustic lights. When I do this in maya, I turn off Illuminate by default or whatever it's called. So basically these lights just cast photons. The performance penalty hasn't been enough to annoy me. If the diffuse from the HDRI isn't getting what you want, you might consider using GI to harden it a bit.

One of the other things is to consider the scale of your shadow and the time of day. Time of day affects how the casted shadow looks. Having it at the wrong angle can immediately make it look unconvincing sometimes.

One mistake I still make from time to time is trying to use one light to light everything. I know there are scenarios where that's appropriate - but most of the time it just gets annoying and hard to deal with.

I don't know how much of this is useful and how much you already know, so I apologize in advance if I sound at all condescending. That isn't my intention at all.

Again, I'm just learning so my methodology isn't great yet.

Anyway, I hope that helps in some way. :)

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