Hi
Can somebody advise on best practices for lighting and shading a stained glass window in Maya (2016) and mental ray? It’s for an exterior scene and I want to render closeups of the window.
My stained glass geometry has some thickness and I’m using MILA Transmission (distance) for the colors with the distance parameter set between 0.05 and 0.1. I have seen workflows for creating stained glass for interiors with sub-surface-scattering and mia_material_x shaders but I want to use purely MILA shaders in my scene.
I’m new to rendering outdoor environments but I have some experience with interiors. Is it common to use portal lights for daylight exterior shots to bounce light rays back through windows?
To light the scene I’m using a HDR image plugged into a rayswitch and a mental ray Physical Sun light with intensity set to 0.1 (default is 0.2)
I’ll post a render when I get a chance.
Thanks