Maya Rendering

This was my first experiment with lightning and HDR lighting in Maya using Mental Ray.

I have wanted to experiment with different lighting since we were taught basic lighting and rendering in our Maya sessions, this was also a good opportunity to look at texturing again, although I only stuck to procedural textures this time.

This was my first attempt, using only directional and area lights, the effect is ok but the room is still to dark over all. There were also some weird spots of light on the left side of the image, I think these were caused by the objects in the scene not having any thickness.
The two attempts below are both using HDR image lighting, the top one still has the directional lights from before turned on, which was probably a mistake, but i do like the lighting on the left which was caused by the HDR.
This gave the nicest result, this was a combination of the HDR and a few lights on the interior, I think it is the best lit of the different setups, however the light falling on the floor may be a bit to strong.

An interesting challenge now would be to take a photo of an interior with interesting lighting and try to recreate that in Maya, with a very basic pass on the objects and shape of the room, and focus on the lighting, trying to match what is in the photo.

Although I don't want to get "pinholed" into only doing realistic lighting. From now on I might try setting up small interiors for my animation tests and using those to test more types of lighting.
What I have found is that HDR lighting is very good for renders that try to be photo realistic, and that is a topic I am very interested in, but not the only thing I want to explore.



I chose to take this one step further and render it out, only a 3 second clip but I wanted to see the result when the camera is moving rather than just static, I think that the result is quite grainy, likely due to me not upping the quality in mental ray, however this is something I will pay more attention to in future.

This is a pulled back version of the image above, showing how the scene us setup.


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