Tutorials Maya : Lighting and Rendering
| Animation
| Fx & Dynamics
| Lighting and
Rendering | MEL | Misc
| Modeling | Textures
and Shaders |
Controlling Fog Density
Fog is a term often used to represent a variety of natural phenomenon
within a 3D renderer. In nature, fog consists of water vapor yet in Maya
you may use 'fog' to also represent dust, smoke, air, smog, plasma, nebulae
or even magical glows and spells. To be able to yield such a variety of
effects from fog, one must have a clear understanding of the volume shader
associated with it. Specifically, our focus in this discussion is 'light
fog', not volume primitives or environment fog. These are related topics,
yet they use different nodes and are for another discussion.
Light Linking in Heavy Scenes
A crucial technique to succesfull lighting is the process of light linking.
The process of simulating reflected light is very much achieved by exclusively
associating lights with objects. Yet new lights are automatically linked
to all surfaces in the scene.
Rendering in Passes and Layers
My purpose here is to give an overview of how 3D elements are prepped
and rendered from Maya for use in a compositing pipeline... You will notice,
however, that I do not mention the Render Layer Manager. Reason is, as
you may expect, that it is clunky and not really the best way to approach
passes/layers.
Shader Glow Tips
By default, when shader glow is enabled on a shader, all parts of a
surface will appear to glow. But what we want is for just the specular,
or brightest areas, to glow. This can be accomplished by editing the Shader
Glow node accessible in Hypershade. Increasing the Threshold value will
bias the glow towards brightness.
Simple Fog
Simple fog is the basic environment fog settings used when creating
fog effects in Maya. As with any environment fog type, Maya creates a
volumetric material. In the case of simple fog attributes, the clipping
distance can be adjusted as well as the height, saturation point and color.
Slide projector
The purpose of this tutorial is to show how to project a movie file
through a light source using it's color node.
Transparency Shadows,
Be aware that volume shadow occlusion only works with depth-map shadows.
This creates problems if you have transparency mapped objects, as is the
case with the wall. So how can we get an object with a transparency map
to cast accurate shadows without raytracing? (i.e. depth-map shadows).
Turning depth map auto focus off to improve shadow quality.
When using depth map shadows, the map resolution is very important to
the quality of the shadow. Sometimes, when your spotlight has a
very wide cone angle, the map resolution will not be large enough
to cover the entire angle with decent quality results.
|
Mayavi Studios News | Mayavi Blog 
