Guerrilla Lighting and Rendering Tactics in Maya

In this lesson, we're going to start walking through the train station scene that we're going to be using for the rest of these tutorials. Now we've already started talking, in previous lessons, about the basics of the workflow that we're going to be using. We've talked about setting up a linear lighting and rendering workflow. We've talked about using portal lights with a ramp for a sky, for a sky contribution, We've also talked about using ambient occlusion to fake light transport effects like, final gather or global illumination. So we're going to start taking some of these concepts and applying them to a more or less production scene. In this case, I've got this train station scene set up. And really, it's not that complicated. I've got an animated camera moving across the scene. And I've got a train that animates in, and it comes to a stop. Pretty simple. I'm using an art deco sort of streamlined modern feel for all of this. I'm currently working on a short film project called, The Sum of Parts, which uses a very similar feel for the project. I've really fallen in love with the art deco style. I love the whole genre of, sort of, retro futurism-- the future as seen from the 1930s. It's really an interesting and unique take on the sci-fi genre. So in this scene, the architecture and the style will actually inform some of our lighting decisions, as well. A lot about the art deco, and retro futurism style, has to do with this big sense of optimism for the future. And I really want that to come across in this particular scene. If you're working on a production for someone else, they always have a fairly good idea of what they want in terms of color keys, and lighting direction, and all these various other things. If you're working on a Gorilla production, probably that's all going to land on you. So a few questions that you need to ask yourself. What's the time of day? What are your light sources? What are your hero assets, and how do they need to be lit in order to read on the screen? And sort of, what's the overall mood and feel for your image? Now whenever I was putting together this concept earlier, this is actually what I came up with in terms of an overall lighting composition. What I really want it to feel like is, that the sun has just come up over the horizon, it's early morning, we've got this bright, bright golden light spilling in through this window and illuminating the rest of the scene. We've also got an implied window behind the camera, that's casting blue light into the scene as well. And the real idea is to have this really bright window that serves as the focal point for the eye until this train comes into the scene and you sort of follow it until it's final resting place towards the end. I'm actually going to use this last frame as, sort of, my hero frame. Now whenever I'm doing render tests, and setting everything up, because this is what I really want to sell, this particular angle, this particular shot, that's what I want to sell in the final image. So in order to do that, a lot of people ask, well, where do I start? What should be the first thing that I do? And personally, I like to start from as blank of a slate as I possibly can. There's currently no lights in this scene. I've got a lot of materials set up, but I really want to nullify all of that and make it so that I'm working with just gray scales, that I can start to play with my color values and really have a good point of reference to work from. So in order to do so, what I'm going to do is just back off of my scene. Right now, inside of the Show menu I've only got polygons turned on. So what I'm going to do is just select everything in the scene that I can see, and essentially what that's now done is just selected all the polygons in the scene. So I'm going to, go back to my camera view, click on the Create New Layer from Selected. So if we go into this new layer, you'll see we have all of our polygons selected. And what I'm going to do is actually select everything except for those objects that are going to be light cards. So the light card for the back window, and the light card for the front window, are going to be de-selected. And what I want to do is apply a material to the rest of this that I can use as sort of a baseline for creating my lights. I went ahead and created an MIA material X with no reflectivity, it's essentially just a Lambert, and I'm going to go ahead and apply that to the scene. I'm getting an error, error while parsing arguments. This usually happens when you're working with render layers and there's something that's not getting carried over between the two. So I'm going to go ahead and pause the video and as soon as I get this resolved I'll bring it back up. All right, I'm back. I'm not entirely sure what that problem was. The render layers inside of Maya are sort of notoriously fickle. Their difficult work with, their not my preferred way of working, but they're just aren't many other options. So I want to an earlier version of this file, which is a good lesson in and of itself, save early, save often, and iterate your savings whenever you can. So, I went to an earlier version of this file, and I was able to create the layer and assign the shaders, no problem. So currently, what I have, is almost all the objects in the scene are using that base shader instead of the shaders that are actually in the master layer. So if I switch between these two, you can actually see what's going on here. So if I go ahead and hit render, just to see what I've got for my baseline. Now this is actually not what I want. Because I want to start with absolutely nothing in my scene. I want to have no lights, whatsoever, to have a base point to work from. And in this case, right now, because there's no lights in the scene, Maya has automatically defaulted to using its default light set. Which, that'll work fine, for a lot of cases, but I really don't want it to be affecting my scene at all. I could go into render settings, and turn that off. But the way that I actually prefer to work, is just to create a light, in the middle of my scene, and give it an intensity of zero, and name this, Null Light. Probably a roundabout way to go about it, but it's been the way that I work for the last few years, so I've gotten used to it. So now if I take a render, what we should get is absolutely nothing. Just a blank scene and that sky card shining through. And this is exactly what I want for my scene. I want to start with absolutely nothing and begin building up the lights in my scene. And that's going to be the next lesson. So in this lesson, we've taken a look at how to set up our scene to get ready for lighting. And we've taken a look at a few the questions that are involved in figuring out exactly what we want in a scene like this.