Maya Lighting

         Light shapes the world by showing us what we see. It creates a sense of depth, it initiates the perception of c olor, and it allows us to distinguish shape and form. For a scene to be successful in CG, these realities of light need to be reproduced as faithfully as possible. The trick is learning to see light and its astonishing effects on the world around us.

Basic Lighting Concepts

It’s no surprise that Maya’s lighting resembles actual direct-lighting techniques used in photography and filmmaking. Lights of various types are placed around a scene to illuminate the subjects as they would for a still life or a portrait. Your scene and what’s init dictate, to some degree at least, which lights you put where. The type of lights you use depends on the desired effect. At the basic level, you want your lights to illuminate the scene. Without lights, your cameras have nothing to capture. Although it seems rather easy to throw your lights in, turn them all on, and render a scene, that couldn’t be further from the truth Lighting is the backbone of CG. Although it’s technically easy to insert and configurelights, it’s ow you light that will make or break your scene. Knowing how to do that eally only comes with a good deal of experience and experimentation, as well as a good ye and some patience.eiques of lighting a scene in Maya

and start you on the road to finding out more.

Learning to See

There are many nuances to the real-world lighting around us that we take for granted. We intuitively understand what we see and how it’s lit, and we infer a tremendous amount of visual information without much consideration. With CG lighting, you must re-create these nuances for your scene. That amounts to all the work of lighting. The most valuable thing you can do to improve your lighting technique is to relearn how you see your environment. Simply put, refuse to take for granted what you see. Question why things look the way they do, and you’ll find that the answers almost always come around to lighting. Take note of the distinction between light and dark in the room you’re in now. Notice the difference in the brightness of highlights and how they dissipate into diffused light and then into shadow. When you start understanding how real light affects objects, you’ll be much better equipped to generate your own light. After all, the key to good lighting starts with the desire to create an interesting image.

What Your Scene Needs

Ideally, your scene needs areas of highlight and shadow. Overlighting a scene flattens everything and diminishes details. This is perhaps the number-one mistake of beginners. Shows a still life with too many bright lights that only flatten the image and remove any sense of color and depth. Similarly, underlighting your scene makes it muddy, gray, and rather lifeless, and it covers your details in darkness and flattens the entire frame. Shows the still life underlit. The bumps and curves of the mesh are hardly noticeable.

Finding a good middle ground to lighting yourscene is key. Like a photographer, you want your image

to have the full range of exposure. You want the richest acks to the brightest whites in your frame to create a

deep sense of detail. Even though you may not have an bsolute black to white in the rendered image, the concept s appealing. As in Figure 10.3, light and shadow omplement each other and work to show the featuresof your surface.