Procedural Texturing in Maya and V-Ray

In this lesson, we will start setting up the main lights for the scene and do some tweaks on the nucleus and the cell membrane shaders. We're going to light the scene using more or less a three point lighting set up. But before I start adding the lights into the scene, I want to go ahead into the hypershade and add some glossiness and reflection to the nucleus and the cell membrane, just so we can get the most out of the lights and the reflection that it casts on the shaders. So to do that, open up the hypershade. Now let's select the nucleus base color. Now just scroll down to the reflection, and the first thing we have to tweak under reflection color, just drag the slider until we get white. For the amount, I'm going for something around 4.5, something along these lines. So if we look at this now-- drag it into the work area, and again press F to focus on it-- we can see that this adds some reflection to the nucleus. But, again, this adds a reflection which is on all of the faces. It's uniform. What I'm looking for is, I'm looking for more of a fresnel effect reflection, which is less reflective when facing the camera, more reflective on the edges. To do that, VRay makes it really easy. What you have to do is, you just have to scroll down a bit and you will see something called Use Fresnel. Just make sure to check that. This you can see immediately. We still have some reflection on the sides, because if you go up and just bring down the black, you'll see there's no reflection now. So this adds some reflection, but the reflection is only visible on the edges and not the facing of the camera. Another thing I'm going to add, I'm going for not a mirrored reflection. I'm going for a more glossiness reflection. And for this one, I'm going to go with something around 6.7. We're going to be doing a couple of tests, so don't worry about these setting. We can tweak them to get the look that we're going for. Now, next one, I'm going to be adding some reflection to the membrane color. So, select membrane color. You can track that here so we can see the tweaks done to it. Again, under reflection color, just slide this to the white. For the amount, I'm going for a less reflective. Something around 2.5 is good. Again, for this one, I'm not looking for a mirrored reflection. I want more of a glossy reflection. I'm going for something around 0.7. Now, let's go back into the perspective and start adding some lights. For this scene, I'm going to be using Vray rect lights. So under Create, Lights, Vray, Rect Light. I'm going to name this key light, and I'm going to start moving it. If we're still having a problem just selecting, go to hypershade. Under the Lights tab, just select it, go back to perspective, and now just move this into place. I want this light to be casting lights from the top right corner on the cell. Now let's open up the attributes and go in and just do a couple of settings and tweaks to this one. For the intensity multiplier, 30 is too much, too high. I'm going to go with 10. Again, we're going to do a couple of tests to see if this is good or not. Now, one thing you have to keep in mind when working with the VRay rectangular lights is when you resize them. I highly recommend using the U size and the V size when resizing a rectangular in VRay. You can go ahead and resize this using the scale, but the problem with this one is, when you start scaling it with the Scale tool, what will happen is it will also affect the intensity and you cannot make sure you don't scale this using the Scale tool, and the U and the V size. Because then you won't be able to tweak this easily. So I highly recommend using only the U and V size when resizing a rectangular. So I'm going to go ahead and just make this a bit towards two point, something like that for the U size. The height, the V size of it, I'm going to go with three or something like that. All right, we're going to do a couple of tests and see if this works for us. All right. Now, for the color, I'm going for a purplish light, bluish light color. And now let's go ahead and do a test render and see how this looks. All right. Just make sure you're rendering using the render, render camera is a camera that we created when we started adding lapilli. So, here we need to have some of the glossiness reflection on this one, on the cell membrane, and on the nucleus. But one other thing we can see is that the light is appearing empty in the render. So to fix that, select the light, and just scroll down until you get to the options, and make sure you have invisible checked. All right. Now just rotate this a bit. And I'm going with a more bluish corner. And now if we do another test render, I'm going to save this. All right. Now you see the light is not appearing in the render anymore. So we're going to move this a bit and rotate it just so we get-- I know I named this a key light, and it's going to look more like a rim light rather than a key light. So, think of it as a mixture of both. All right. I'm going to move this a bit to the back, or even we can bring down the intensity to something around eight, and do another test render. All right, this is looking far much better. One thing I want to add is I want this reflection and the light to affect more of a sphere. And what I'm going to do is, I'm going to make the height a bit bigger. So I'm going to go something around three. And now if we save this, I'll just do a render on this section. As you can see, this adds more light so the light is bigger, and we have more light affecting the cell. Again, you can tweak this until you get the look that you're going for. I'm going to maybe tweak this a bit more. U and then the V as well. Now I'm going to go ahead and add another light, which is going to give us a rim light on the bottom left corner of this one. And for the fill like, I'm going to use a dome light. Now, to create a new light, we can either duplicate this one-- I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this light by hitting Control+D or Command+D, and I'm going to name this rim light. Move this into place. Just rotate this. I'll just hit the bottom left. I'm going to make this a bit smaller. And for the intensity, I'm going with a lower intensity. Something around four. And now if we do a test render. Now, as you can see, this adds a nice, strong rim key light to the right side, and this adds a more faint light to the left side. This gives a nice look to the sphere. Now we can see the bump maps and now we can see the glossiness and reflection of this, and we can see the nice colors that the nucleus has. Now, in the next lesson, we will add the dome light and set up an image-based lighting for the scene.