AET 26 3D Rendering | Mental Ray: Week 01

Posted on NINJAPosted in Maya Rendering

Mental Ray: Rendering Images To Look Photo Realistic

Production cycle:
1- Preproduction
2- Production
3- Post Production

material
light
camera: changing the focal length to determine how much of the scene you are going to see.

Renderer of Choice…

  • vRay:  quicker results, cleaner renders.  but mental ray is more robust. Can use code to affect renders.

Video example of lighting and CG

3 POINT LIGHTING SYSTEM

  • keylight
  • fill light- fill subjects side with light the key light isn
  • rim light- pop subject from the bg

Maya Lights

ambient light

  • – loses contrast on your objects.
  • – not really used.

point light:

  • –

spot light:

  • – like a cone
  • Penumbra Angle
    – value -10/10 features off edge inward or outward.

directional light:

  • – simulate sunlight

volume light:

  • – good for creating mood lighting. You can see the volume encroaching onto your subject

area light:

  • – more realistic light
  • – smaller the lighter, the brighter the larger, like a soft box

 

Adjusting Render Settings Panel for Lights and Shadows

RENDER SETTINGS WINDOW || (Maya Software) Common Tab > Render options > enable/disable Default Light

RENDERING SHADOWS

  • Raytracing Shadows:
    • – no excuse not to use this. more accurate shadows from light to object to lens
    • Raytrace Shadow Attributes:
      • Light Radius: higher number diffuses the shadow. the lower the crisper
      • Shadow rays: the softness of the shadow
    • RENDER SETTINGS WINDOW || MENTAL RAY > FEATURES (tab) > check Ray Tracing.
  • Depth Map Shadows:
    • – quality isn’t as great. Saving time isn’t that much more than ray tracing.

     

Adjusting your quality of Renders

  • RENDER SETTINGS WINDOW || MENTAL RAY > Quality > Quality Presets > Draft (for previews) Production (for final output)

 

 

Render is normally done in passes. (i.e. shadows, speculars, models, etc will be rendered separately.) Then it is combined in another program like NUKE or FUSION.. After Effects can be used but the colorspace will be affected and only takes you so far. Should always work in a linear workflow.

This brings up the question of colors.. monitors are sRGB. they aren’t built to be viewed as 32bit. That’s why images may appear really dark or light(washed out).

A 10bit lcdpanel

 

Homework
create 6 moods, different colors.. with lights using the fruit from still_lifev01.mb.