Need help with lighting

[1armedScissor]

Is there going to be animation? Or is this going to be a still? Will you have access to a renderfarm? Are you concerned about rendering times?

For simple outdoor scenes that are only lit with sunlight, you can get pretty far with the following;

1 pass with a directional light
1 ambient occlusion pass
1 texture only pass (for compositing with the ambient occlusion pass) & using as a global fill.

Color & adjust each of the above as needed in your composite and you can get fairly nice results very quickly. Of course there is much more you can do, even with the above example (splitting your lighting passes into; diffuse, specular, etc.), generating a few "bounce" lights.

I don't beleive there are any gi solutions for maya software, so the above might be pretty usefull for you. You could also look for some of the dome based lighting rigs available on the net, but imo I prefer ao multiplied over my textures over the results from a dome light.

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