Transforming Robot Production Pipeline Volume 9: Lighting and Rendering

OK for the first few lessons of this course, we're going to start the process of setting up our initial lighting for this transforming robot sequence. OK. So we're going to begin with this sequence that Delano has already animated for us. So you can see our movement. And actually, we're going to switch this over to our Shop Cam, which this is the sequence that Chris has motion tracked for us, or camera tracked. OK. So we have our basic movement of this truck going into the transformer, and what we need to do is set up some lighting so that it matches our live action background plate. So the first thing I'm going to do is load up my live action plate as an image plate-- that way, I have something to at least match my lighting to-- and see if we're on the right track. So with the Shot Cam selected, let's go to View, Image Plane, and Import Image. Now, if you take a look inside the Source Images directory of the project that we're working out of, we do have a folder in here called Image Plane sequence. So let's double-click on this. Let's load up the first frame of our background plate here. Double-click on that. And there we go. So let's now go to Image Plane Attributes, take a look at the attributes for this. And let's make a few minor little adjustments here. The first thing we can do is use an image sequence, so that way, as we start to move through time, our image plane will update. And this is, again, our live action sequence that we're going to be matching this to. Now, you'll notice that right now, the image plane is sort of intersecting with the robot at a certain point. So let's scroll down and we're going to look for this depth. OK. So let's push this back a little bit. I'll just Control right-click so I can move this interactively, and I move this back so that we have plenty of distance. I'll set this up to a depth of something close to 1,000. That should work. OK. So we can go ahead and, if we want, just take a quick render at what we have. You'll see that, really, we have absolutely nothing set up at this point. So I'm starting with a completely blank scene, no lights whatsoever. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, one thing that I do want to mention is that right now I am currently working and rendering on a system that is a fairly high-end 64-bit system. Now, if you happen to be following along with this and you're trying to work on a 32-bit system, I actually can't guarantee that this scene will even render on a 32-bit system, because this is a fairly complex scene, and especially once we start to plug in the textures, you're going to find that this becomes a very, very system resource intensive scene. So again, if you happen to be following along on a 32-bit system, you may or may not to be able to even render this scene at all. And unfortunately, that's just sort of the nature of the beast when it comes to working with these more complex projects like this. Now, the thing that we need to keep in mind is that this background image, or this live action plate, was shot at HD quality. So we need to make sure that we're at least rendering this out in some kind of a widescreen format. So let's go to our Render settings. Scroll down. And I'll set this to HD 720, which will give us 1280 by 720. That's the proper ratio for this-- at least in this situation. That matches the background footage that we're going to be using. So we have our resolution set. Now, let's make sure that this image plane fits properly. So I'm going to make sure that we have this Fit to Resolution Gate. Click on that. You'll notice the size is updated just very slightly. But what that should do, now, is ensure that the image plane fits edge to edge, exactly as we need it to. OK. Very nice. Now, this image plane really won't have any impact at all on our render results. It really just gives me something to base my lighting off of and make sure that I am, at least, matching this up pretty closely. Now, when I'm working, at least in this early, early, stage, it's really, really important, I find, to keep your renders moving as quickly as possible. So a lot of times, what I like to do, is once I have my resolution set-- in this case, 1280 by 720-- really, at this point, I don't necessarily need to render that large of an image. So, in this case, what I'll sometimes do is go in and set this to a test resolution of like 50, or maybe 75% of my actual render size. That way, it'll keep the same resolution, but render it just a little bit smaller. And that way, I can keep things moving just that much faster. There we are. So that will be pretty manageable, at least for this starting point so I can keep things moving-- again, just as quickly as possible. Now, any time you're going to be compositing some kind of a CG element onto live action footage, wherever you were acquiring this footage or whoever has been actually out shooting this-- one thing they should always have with them, or that you should always have with you whenever you go out to shoot these is to always make sure you take some kind of an image probe with you. And that way, you can use that image probe to make sure that you capture all of the surrounding environment. You can set your different exposures, take a number of different exposures of these spheres, merge those into HDR images, unwrap them, and that's really going to be essential for making sure that your lighting matches up properly with your real live action plate. Now, if you've never actually set up or built your own HDR images, we actually do discuss this in a great amount of detail in our HDRI Workflow with Maya and Photoshop course. So if you want to learn more about this process and exactly why this is such an important thing and how to build your own, then, by all means, you can refer to that course. So while we were on location, Chris was shooting these HDR spheres-- lots of different exposures, lots of different angles-- and we were able to take those different spheres, unwrap those, and to build a spherical environment that we can now use back in Maya. So to set this up, let's first go into our Render settings. We're going to go into our Indirect Lighting tab, and we're going to drop in an IBO environment, or an Imaged-Based Lighting. Let's create this. I'll just move that out of the way for now. Let's go to our image. We'll plug this in. And we're going to use this IBO image. And this is, essentially, just an unwrapped map of the same sphere or this image probe that we just looked at a moment ago. So again, lots of different exposures, lots of different angles have all been stitched together to form this unwrapped map. And, again, if you've never done this before, we do go through this entire process in our HDRI Workflow in Maya and Photoshop course. OK. So let's plug this in. So there's our IBO image. Let's turn on Final Gathering. Let's take a quick render. OK. So at least we do have some initial lighting that's been set up in here. Now, one thing that we do need to do is-- let's go over into our Common tab. Let's scroll all the way down to the bottom into our Render options, and I'm going to make sure I have this Enabled Default Light turned off, so that way, we don't wind up having any interference from Maya's default light, and that way, we can see this with just the pure Image-Based Lighting on this. Now, as you can see right now, my image is really, really dark at this point. So what we'll do in our next lesson is explore the process of setting up a linear workflow so we can get the Image-Based Lighting results looking proper with our live action plates.