Maya lighting GI and FG

[kanooshka]

Well, that's a very big question to answer and it comes up a lot. Here are my tips:

1.Practice
2.Study light and how it reacts in the real world
3.Take photographs with an SLR or DSLR camera, this helps you understand light, lenses and how it all works
4. Practice
5.There's lots of literature, I'd recommend Jeremy Birn's book Lighting and Rendering (http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Lighting-Rendering-Jeremy-Birn/dp/0321316312/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266021127&sr=8-1)
6.Join in the Lighting challenges (http://forums.cgsociety.org/forumdisplay.php?f=185), that's what originally got me interested and observing
8.Practice!

[kJJB]

Thx for the tips, im making a try. it ill be posting as wip soon as possible ;)

[kJJB]

okay here i go,

this is a little scène that i make during the afternoon, my goal was to get a toon like render. So here is the base scene :

http://www.azziel-design.com/objets/wip/WIP_BASE.jpg

well nothing special here ^^

-Second the AO render :
http://www.azziel-design.com/objets/wip/WIP_AO.jpg

And the last shot with lighting and shader :

http://www.azziel-design.com/objets/wip/WIP_RENDER.jpg


Well this is it! critiques up

[mister3d]

That looks cool! :)

[kanooshka]

You're definitely off to a good start. Here's some feedback for you.

One thing I'm noticing is that the sunlight shadow is not parallel. When it comes to a light source as far away as the sun it casts parallel shadows. If you're using a spotlight try pulling the light further away from the window. For the most part your materials are very reflective. The monitor is more reflective than the handle of the fridge. You may even want to disable reflectivity for now in your render settings and focus on specularity only for the time being. I'd also recommend researching the fresnel effect a little, here's a link to start with: http://www.3drender.com/glossary/fresneleffect.htm (http://www.3drender.com/glossary/fresneleffect.htm)

The lighting on the right side of the table is a little confusing, for instance the left side of the mouse pad is very brightly lit but I don't know which light source would be causing that. The items inside of the cup could use a little more shaping with the light, they are looking fairly flat and evenly shaded.

Interested to see some more work and hope you care to try out the lighting challenges.

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