Maya Rendering Help - Shadow Noisy, Material and Light Improvment

#1

Hi everybody,

This is my first Maya render technical post on forum.
I am a beginner and currently learning Maya - Mental Ray rendering. I have created a studio scene with a sphere and a mi_car_paint_phen material applied on it. As seen from the rendered image the shadows are very grainy (noisy, blotchy). I am using two spot lights in the scene. And I am rendering with Indirect Light - Final Gathering (No GI). How can I improve the shadow quality. I have looked and tried to change every setting under Final Gather and Shadows without any success to improve this. Please see the attached images also the render settings I am using. Let me know if I should provide other settings screenshots.

Please help / give me some hints to improve the lights shadows and the material for this scene. Looking forward to reading your comments.

Thanks a bunch.

Final Rendered Image
Please view the image at 100% by right clicking on it and choose: Chrome - Open Image in New Tab, FireFox - View Image

Render Settings
Indirect Lighting - tab


Quality - tab



Features - tab

Wireframe Scene

Spot Lights Settings - Both are the same

#2

Raise the shadow rays for your lights to 8, then 16, then higher if you need to. You have this at 1, currently.

Raise your high and low samples in your area light attributes.

The white “rim” is just part of the car paint shader.

#3

Awesome… Thank you so much!

Shadows looks much more better. However, isn’t any other material that I can use to prevent these “rim” reflections?

Any other tips to improve the render and materials?

#4

that rim is a nice effect that naturaly happens named BRDF fresnel effect. if u don’t want it try other materials like mia_material.
Pleas read mental ray Architectural documentation installed originally with maya on your computer and you will find a lot of techniques in it. Good Luck!

#5

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