Guerrilla Lighting and Rendering Tactics in Maya

In this lesson we're going to set up the sky and windows for our train station scene. So back in Maya, I'm going to go ahead and start by creating an IBL node in order to hold the sky that we're going to have for the scene. So I'm going to go up to my render settings, go to indirect lighting, let that load, and go to create image-based lighting. This is exactly like we did with the previous lesson. I went ahead and created a sky for us to use. If I go to my hypershade real quick, I went ahead and created a ramp that approximates what I want for the sky, which is right here. And you'll notice inside of the ramp that defines sort of the main sky color, we've got this really nice, sort of burning effect where the yellow fades to a red color before it fades into the blue. The reason for this is that this color is actually another shade of red. But it's intensity value is set to something higher than one. So I changed a hue saturation value here. We can see that this value is set at two. And it's actually in an orange range as opposed to a bright yellow range. And this gives us a much nicer fall off between the two colors. It'll also actually contribute to the overall sky color whenever we import our portal lights. So I'm going to grab this ramp real quick. I'll bring it down to my work area. And I am going to gamma correct this. But because I'm using the Kludge tools, I can go and plug it in to the color on the IBL shape. And just click on the ramp, open up Kludge. Let's put this on one half of the window so we can see what's going on. So I have the texture selected. Just go down to the linear workflow and hit insert gamma node for selected. So that'll be now properly gamma corrected for being displayed on the scene. Go back into the IBL node and make sure that this is set on texture. And now you can see that we've got our nice sunset color values coming into the scene. And that's exactly what I want to see. So now whenever we create portal lights in the scene, which will probably be in the next lesson, you'll see that we're getting the sky color contribution coming in from this IBL node that we've made. So the next step that I want to do is really start to illuminate this back window, especially. We aren't actually going to see the window that's on the back wall behind. But I'm also going to light that one in the same way, just so that we can have something for the objects in this scene to be reflecting. So I'm going to go ahead and create probably a-- let's create a directional light. And this will be controlling only the intensity of that particular window in the back. So I'm just going to rotate this so that it's pointing at this window. The angle doesn't matter so much. We can tweak this later if we decide that it's something we want to play with. And I'm just going to name this. Let's call it Far Window Intensity. And this is going to be linked to only this one window. So I'm going to go up to window, relationship editors, to light linking, choose light centric. And I'm going to choose this far window intensity and deselect all of the objects in this scene. We don't have to worry about deselecting all of the shading groups, so long as the polygons themselves that are being linked, it should work fine. So I go back into station interior and go to far wall and link this to only the frosted window. So if I go back to my camera view and grab a render of this, I take a snapshot and just see what we get in this corner. What we should see is some glow coming in from that directional light. And I've got this shader set up to be translucent. So it's allowing light through in parts of it without letting through all of the light. So it's not actually transparent. It's translucent. It's sort of like a frosted or a milky glass window. So what I want to do is start to get some color out of this light as well. And I'm going to use a black body radiator in order to get the color for this light. So what I'm going to do is go back to the attribute editor for this light in the shape node. And I'm going to choose the checker box to bring up my various nodes. Go down to mental ray. And I'm going to create a mental ray light called the MIB black body. Essentially what this does is it uses Kelvin color temperature to define what the color of a light is. Now if you want something that's green light or purple light, this is not going to really help you. This is only sort of a non-filtered color temperature thing. So I'm going to choose something that's in the orange range, which, in my case, is going to be something around 3200. That's actually fairly standard for a incandescence light, which is sort of in the range for early sunlight. We can tweak this later if we decide we want it more saturated or more colorful. We can also use the intensity rollout in order to change the overall brightness of this light. And this is actually being controlled now inside of the color values instead of the actual attributes inside of the light. So I'm going to change this intensity to say 2, go back to my camera view, and take a render of this. What we should get is only this back wall being illuminated with this sort of bright, orangey look. We may want to push that more towards yellow. We may want to push that back towards red, depending on sort of the overall look and feel for the scene that we want. But for now, this is probably looking pretty good. We're going to do the exact same thing. I'm just going to actually duplicate this light real quick. I'm going to go to edit, and duplicate special. Go to my options box and make sure that I am duplicating the input connections. Hit Apply. And essentially what this will do is actually create another black body node connected to this light the same way that it was in this one. So if I go ahead and move this guy over and rotate him back so that he's pointing towards this back window-- again, the angle doesn't really matter a whole lot. I just want to make sure that it's consistent. And I'm going to go back into window, relationship. Go back to light linking, light centric. This second one, I'm just going to rename this real quick to Near Window Intensity. And from here, we're going to make sure that this is also being linked to only the near wall frosted window. Go back to my camera, and if I actually turn it around, we can see exactly what this is going to look like. Take a render. And we're getting the exact same result on this side. So I want to change the color values that I'm getting out of this window. So I'm going to go back into that directional light. Go to the color rollout. I'm going to change my temperature to something really, really blue. In this case, let's start at 8000 and take another render just to see what this looks like. And that's getting much closer to what we want. Probably want to turn down the intensity on this, so that we don't clip out to white. So I'm going to turn down the intensity down to, say, 0.5 because we want this to feel like it's only coming from the sky. We don't want to have any direct light on here. But we also want it strong enough to really show up in reflections and really read that there's a window back there. So if I go ahead and retry this render, we'll start getting something that's a little bit more subdued, I suppose you could say. But it isn't quite as saturated as I'd like. So I'm just going to crank this up to, say, 10,000. Now this is pushing and sort of it's kind of twisting reality a bit. You're not actually going to get those kind of temperatures in the light. But it really depends on what works best. That's getting pretty good. That's about where I want it to be. And this'll form the basis of the rest of our lights in our scene, whenever we start putting that together. So I'm going to go back to my camera view. And I'm just going to go back to my master lair real quick with all of my materials in it, just so that we can see sort of what's going on in terms of reflections right now. I've already set up all the materials in this scene. I've kind of cheated, I guess you could say, because I've already tweaked all of these materials knowing what the lighting set up will look like eventually. But for the purposes of this tutorial, it's a good example to see sort of how things are affecting the final look as we go along. So I'm going to take another render, give that a minute or so to work. And I'm going to go ahead and pause the video and come back when everything is done. So this is what we're currently getting. And I really want to punch up the values here to make sure that we're bringing in a lot of that intensity and really showing up in the reflections on the floor. If you remember what that image looked like before, we've actually got some really clear reflections here. And these lights are blowing out quite a bit. Now some of this is emphasized because of the way that I composited it together. But we really want it to be a lot brighter. So I'm going to take a look at that one more time. And I'll pause the video and come back whenever I've figured that out. OK, so with the black body intensity set to 8, we're actually getting something a little bit closer to what I ultimately want in this scene. We're actually getting some really clear reflections on the floor. And we're really blowing out the highlights on this light. Now the other thing to note in this particular render is that the Digital Tutors sign up here and the train itself, the light metal here, they're not actually reflecting what's inside of the scene, particularly. They're reflecting the sky because they're currently set up using an environment blur material that samples the environment. And that's something that we're going to take a look at in a later tutorial. But, for now, just bear in mind that this is not a really accurate reflection of what you're going to see in the final image. So in this tutorial we've taken a look at setting up the sky for the scene and setting up the windows in order to get proper reflections in our scene. In the next lesson, we'll take a look at creating the portal lights that'll provide direct light that is coming in directly from the sky.