kanooshka
12-06-2008, 03:44 AM
I recently had the privilege of viewing the tutorial DVD Lighting & Rendering in Maya: Lights and Shadows by Jeremy Birn and thought I would help the CG Community by writing this review. For those of you who don't know, Jeremy Birn is a Lighting TD from Pixar Animation Studios who has worked on films such as The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Wall-E and their new upcoming feature Up. He brings his professional knowledge in tools and techniques to these tutorial videos.
Lighting serves as the backbone of any great render and this DVD shows how to achieve high quality renderings while not sacrificing render time in a production environment. The tutorials begin with the basics of lighting in Maya proceeding through each light type and their relevant properties. Along the way universal topics such as color,intensity,diffuse, specular, etc.. are explained. One topic which is extensively covered is shadows. Jeremy Birn explains situations where an artist may choose raytraced shadows vs. depth-mapped shadows and vice versa. All these topics are thoroughly covered in separate videos at about 10 minutes apiece filled with explanations, tips and tricks that can be useful in many applications.
Along the way there are a few exercises such as matching the lighting of an orange, lighting a simple room, and in the end, all of these tools come together into a final lighting tutorial showing how to light a kitchen scene, all Maya scene files are included both starting and finished.
The skills learned throughout can be applied in the simplest to the most complex of scenes and therefore I would recommend this DVD to Maya beginners, intermediates and even advanced users who feel they would like to improve their skills. Though this DVD does not cover subjects such as Global Illumination or Final Gather it teaches fast rendering indirect lighting techniques while having high quality results.
I also recommend this for users who use other software packages but only for those who hold some knowledge of their software package's lighting tools. In this case the DVD would be more of a tool for lighting principles and techniques as opposed to learning your software packages tools. NOTE: All scene files on DVD are for Maya ONLY!
For those of you who would like more information please go to:
http://3drender.com/DVD1/index.htm
Lighting serves as the backbone of any great render and this DVD shows how to achieve high quality renderings while not sacrificing render time in a production environment. The tutorials begin with the basics of lighting in Maya proceeding through each light type and their relevant properties. Along the way universal topics such as color,intensity,diffuse, specular, etc.. are explained. One topic which is extensively covered is shadows. Jeremy Birn explains situations where an artist may choose raytraced shadows vs. depth-mapped shadows and vice versa. All these topics are thoroughly covered in separate videos at about 10 minutes apiece filled with explanations, tips and tricks that can be useful in many applications.
Along the way there are a few exercises such as matching the lighting of an orange, lighting a simple room, and in the end, all of these tools come together into a final lighting tutorial showing how to light a kitchen scene, all Maya scene files are included both starting and finished.
The skills learned throughout can be applied in the simplest to the most complex of scenes and therefore I would recommend this DVD to Maya beginners, intermediates and even advanced users who feel they would like to improve their skills. Though this DVD does not cover subjects such as Global Illumination or Final Gather it teaches fast rendering indirect lighting techniques while having high quality results.
I also recommend this for users who use other software packages but only for those who hold some knowledge of their software package's lighting tools. In this case the DVD would be more of a tool for lighting principles and techniques as opposed to learning your software packages tools. NOTE: All scene files on DVD are for Maya ONLY!
For those of you who would like more information please go to:
http://3drender.com/DVD1/index.htm