Guerrilla Lighting and Rendering Tactics in Maya

In this lesson, we're going to go over some production render settings and also set up a few MEL tools to help with workflows. So inside of Maya, I'm just going to go ahead and bring up the render settings for this scene, which is the train station that we're going to be working with in later lessons. And I'm just going to walk through what my render settings are. Inside of the Common tab, I've got my image format set to Open EXR. There's a few benefits to this. First of all, Open EXR is a natively 32-bit format, which means that whenever we bring it into [INAUDIBLE], our images are going to have a lot of latitude that we otherwise wouldn't be able to have. In order to get that 32-bit image out, we also have to go to Quality and turn on a 32-bit frame buffer. If you're having issues with storage and you need to cut down your file size, you can also set this to 16-bit, which is a half format, which still gives you a lot more leeway than your average 8-bit jpeg, but it isn't quite as massive as the 32-bit image. Going back to the Common tab, I'm also rendering at HD 720. The main reason why I chose this format is because my main delivery for this is on the web, and 1080 is just a little bit of overkill for that. But I really like the widescreen format and I think it looks really nice for web delivery. Inside of Quality, these first three settings up here inside of Raytrace/Scanline Quality are really where you're going to live in terms of overall quality adjustment. The min and max sample levels, I've found from the production quality preset, are actually pretty good. Like it says here, it gives you one sample per pixel in the minimum sample level and 16 samples at the max. The real question is, how are you allocating these samples? And I've found that 16 samples per pixel is plenty for getting a really nice quality result, but it's not being allocated in the same way that you really want. So in order to get a little bit nicer quality, I think by default this is set at 0.1. You're gonna want to play with this a little bit, but I've found for this particular scene, 0.05 seems to be a really nice number. Essentially what that's doing is saying to allocate that 16 samples at a higher ratio than it previously was. I also tend to turn my filter to Mitchell. That gives me a much sharper, crisper result than the default, which is on Gauss, which I can soften out later if I really feel like it in the compositing package. It's mainly a matter of just personal preference, but I really like the crisp field that Mitchell gives me. I've got Jitter turned off right now. We may turn this back on later on if we start to get some sampling errors. Essentially, what Jitter does is it randomizes the sampling per frame, which allows you get past some issues with sampling when you've got weird little artifacts. So something to just bear in mind if you're getting those kinds of results, try turning on Jitter and see if that doesn't resolve itself between frames. So that's pretty much the render settings that I tend to use. Normally, I would set this up at the very end of the production workflow because I want to do my preview renders at a much lower quality. It takes a lot less time, but because this tutorial is so much about render time and getting that best result, what I want to do is make sure that whenever we make a change, we've got a good baseline to measure against. So whenever we do make a change, we can really see how it's affecting our final render time. So that being said, let's move on to some MEL script concerns. If you take a look at the files that are included with this tutorial, you'll find something called kludge tools. If you go ahead and download that file, it's a .MEL file, put it in your default scripts location, which in my case, I'm on Windows 7. Go to Libraries, Documents, Maya, your Maya version, and Scripts, and bring this MEL file in. Essentially, this is a bunch of custom tools that I've written for this tutorial in order to bring that in. If you've just brought that file in, instead of having to close down Maya and reopen it, you can just type in Rehash which will essentially force Maya to revisit its file structures and force it to locate that file. If we go ahead and type in source, kludge tools, and then kludge tools, that will open up the Kludge Tools menu. If you go down to Digital Tutors, you'll find that I've got lots and lots of buttons in a very badly organized manner, and these are essentially just tools that I've come up with that should help you with the workflows associated with this tutorial. And we'll be revisiting this and revisiting this train station scene in a later lesson, but for now I just wanted to make sure that we get those things set up. So in this lesson, we've talked about putting together your production render settings and loading in some MEL tools that'll help with workflows down the line.