Arnold's Lights and Incandescence for Maya 2018

hey guys it's Monica at academic Phoenix plus and today we're gonna go over basic lighting using Arnold for also texturing this a very simple sci-fi room so in the last episode were in the last tutorial but I like to call them episodes because I think it's more exciting in the last episode we actually modeled this and on the plus side I went ahead in animated e so now they're hovering so it's like cool little hovering chairs so it's pretty neat in this tutorial we're also gonna be talking about incandescent so incandescent is basically the surface is illuminating looks like a light source but I want to show you two ways of creating incandescent one of them is using the Arnold's mesh light and the other ones using a texture both of them have different attributes let's take a look if you guys want to follow along you are more than welcome to you can either follow the previous episode and actually model this yourself or if you want to texture and follow along you're more than welcome to download it for free at academic Phoenix plus com so again that is a free download and while you're at it you're more than welcome to sign up for my newsletter where you will get pre-release contents and a bunch of other perks alright enough of that let's go ahead and get started so I'm gonna take a look at this first one the first one that I could do is create a Arnold light and you're gonna see something called a mesh light it gives me a warning down here that says hey there is a a bunch of objects called chair ringing geo shape so the reason why is because we duplicated them as a group instead of duplicating the objects individually so that's an easy fix I just have to change this to one let me open up my windows outliner and you can see that I have Group one group two group three but the issue is if I've opened these you're gonna notice that they're all called the same so this is Group one I'm gonna chair change this one to chair one and so forth I'm probably gonna post this video so you don't have to watch me type and I'll be right back okay I'm back so now everything is labeled appropriately chair one group one has everything in one's twos group 2 has twos so and so forth alright now we shouldn't get an error so let's select our object let's go to Arnold lights mess light and it looks like nothing happened but let's open up the attributes ctrl a to open up the attributes and right away you can see that we have a chair ring and it turned into a geo shape which is right here at the light and we have color intensity and it should look like a regular light so if I render it out you're gonna notice that it's emitting light but the issue is is that you don't see the mesh so just click on this little guy right here I'm gonna close this I'm gonna turn it on again and it doesn't look like it's very intense so like normal eyes there we go i selecting normalize notice that it's a little bit more you're gonna start to see a little bit more light and the reason why is because keying calculations based on the object versus the scale so just go ahead and turn that off we can go ahead and increase our intensity I'm really not sure why it's not showing up there it is there's the light and we can this is very interesting that's what it's supposed to do is supposed to turn on and then the object should show up so our note seems to be having a little bit of a issue right now so I'm going to save as just in case and let's go ahead and increase the intensity again and scroll down and let's take a look at a couple of objects so not only can we see the mesh we can also turn on a light visible again sometimes it's good to just go ahead and run and close it and open it up so that you can refresh it and there we go so not only can we see the original mesh you can also turn on light visible and then you will in fact see the light so notice that it is a little noisy right now but it's working it's illuminating light so the mesh itself has turned into a light source so we can pick a color like this and notice that it's having a hard time again so I'll probably have to restart it but the point is is that we now have a light source with that color so I'm gonna pick something a little lighter trying to go for a little bit more sci-fi getting worried because my computer looks like it's gonna die so let's go ahead and do this I'm gonna make the selection and maybe we want to decrease the into wow it's really having a hard time and then increase it I don't know if you guys are getting the same issue but I can increase the exposure which it means that it's going to over expose the area and therefore it will let it would it looks like it's emitting more light so I think it's still a little intense I'm gonna decrease my intensity a little bit my exposure and I'm gonna leave it like that I'm probably going to increase my samples like so and then let's see what else do we have and I think I'll just keep it like that for now okay so that's using the mesh like now the mesh light uses accurate ray trace shadows so it doesn't MIT lights and it based on rate Ray's calculation so it's accurate however we're gonna do the same thing but this time we're gonna use this one now I'm gonna right click assign a new material and this time we're gonna use a texture that's gonna drive this we're gonna use the AI standard surface provided by Arnold I personally like to increase my weight all the way to one I'm gonna scroll down till I see emission let's take a look at what it looks like right now like nothing you can see a little bit of noise but that's because it's in fact the light from the other mesh light this is gonna be driven by texture so I'm gonna increase my weight and right away you can see the effect so I can make it all the way to one or just gradually go as high as you want so let's go ahead and blast it let's make the same color as we did the other one it's producing a really nice color but it's not as bright as the other one now just because the weight is 1 doesn't mean you can't push this a little bit further so I'm gonna press 2 you can see now that the texture is actually emitting light which is pretty neat but it doesn't go very far however it still works which is awesome so if you want to continue you can keep pushing this and pushing the way until you get even more like the only issue with this is that it's a little bit less expensive but doesn't calculate rate trees as well as perhaps a light so you can see that we also have a lot of noise going on so that's something that we're gonna have to take care of and I reduce the roughness I'm gonna reduce the specularity because it doesn't need it turn off specularity because you can't really see it and I'm gonna change the color to this as well just in case yes and let's take a look at both of them at the same time notice the difference once red once well just regular that should tell you that they're just to separate basically it's driving two separate things let's render this out looks right over here press play hope it doesn't break anything now the nice thing about this mesh light is that you can select a piece of geometry and create mesh now the only issue is like let's say that you want it to make the ring of Lord of the Rings and you wanted the text of the of the ring to actually glow well you can't select every single face and do it you actually have to create a texture for it so then that's what you would use this map for is to create a texture that glows so there's a lot of noise going on which I'm probably it's probably gonna be the render setting so what I'm gonna do is going to use this as a mesh light so when I use all of these as a mesh light and use the same attributes change the color and do the same thing for these guys and don't forget to turn on this and turn off normalize cuz otherwise it's gonna act crazy and then again one last time okay let's turn on light visible yeah let's take a color here and let's turn off normal eyes I think it looks pretty good we'll see what Arnold thinks when we render it out okay whoops forgot something there close that let me turn this on I go to my outliner there's so if you need to grab it notice that I went to my outliner does a little plus sign that's in a new addition selected from here and then he can go and turn off that I did turn it off and on show mesh normalizes off okay sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't interesting very unpredictable it's too bad it shouldn't act like that I feel like I did something wrong well gonna increase my samples whoops not that much you might be easier just to go through the outliner let's see visible normalize let's go ahead and change this to two - can't shadows Chuck called this out okay we'll do one more show color like visible let's do two samples turnoff normalize so something strange about number are you not you something odd about this one this one's having a hard time hmm I'll just delete it and then try again Arnold light mesh light let's go like this change it to two light visible to render interesting I'll try to figure out in a little bit so this one's exposures up so I'm gonna reduce that so everyone's about the same and then I can make sure that I can fix all of them if need be so let's render it well one more time and that's what our environment looks like so far except for that weird one in the back so we got an odd one out all right so let's go ahead and like to seen a little bit more so I'm gonna save and I'm going to add one of my favorite lights which is under Arnold lights I like area lights now according to this image it looks actually like studio lighting everything's pretty flat so I'm gonna go ahead and use kind of like a studio based lighting so I'm gonna kind of drag this area light looks I'm gonna push it back over here make sure it's kind of facing the scene like so you get a little higher and we could see what that looks like doesn't look like very much and the reason why and let's see if my computer can handle this is the same thing as mesh lights is that you have to turn off normal eyes there we go by turning off normalize it doesn't look at the scale anymore it looks at just the light lighting the whole environment so that's really what we want so I'm gonna increase my resolution to 1024 powers of 2 I'm gonna change the color to a color slightly purple according to the reference now you can see that's illuminating a lot here so I'm gonna try to bring that up a little higher maybe a little closer this way cool it's coming along just a slightly more purple color just gonna break it apart a little bit cool we're getting some lighting nice lighting all right this is just kind of like a basic light I'm gonna duplicate this control D then move this to this whoops not that do I have it yes okay drag this to the other side like so point it down a little bit this way and this one I think I'm gonna do a similar color as the seats or the mesh lights but just a little bit lighter blue let's see what that looks like oops over here let's press play it's a little strong I kind of liked the look the gradient look so let me grab this and I'm going to reduce the color just a little bit and I'm gonna keep the intensity as is and I'm gonna increase my samples so the rendering is starting to cause what's called fireflies it just means that it's calculating a lot and it's trying to figure it out so he causes his little fire flags and they have way to fix us so we have to crank up the values but we'll crank up the values more when we have a more finished piece all right so we have a little bit of purple a little bit of blue it's kind of like a nice little gradient I might want to increase the intensity of this one just a little bit more let me open up the attributes control 8ub just a little bit more let's try one point five there we go - we're starting to see their room a little bit more zoom in let's pretend that we are taking a picture let's turn on the resolution gate this is the resolution gate so we get to see exactly what's over here okay enough looks okay this is probably not the best way to do it but this is how I do it I'm gonna keyframe my camera so I'm gonna select my camera by clicking on this camera right here this little icon then I'm click on the letter S it's gonna create a keyframe on my camera and the reason why is because I can move my camera around and then go back by doing this now most people have a camera called render cam most people do not do this but I find it to be very confined it convenience so I can just move around I don't have to hop around cameras all right so our scene is coming along now but I hope that was helpful that was an introduction to Arnold mesh lights as well as Arnold's incandescent alright the plus section this is the plus in academic Phoenix plus so I wanted to show you that it can be a little bit of a pain to select each of these little light sources and then maybe even scroll out and try to grab my lights and if this is a simple scene imagine if you have a huge environment full of lights Arnold and Maya work together I suppose to create this handy little tool called and I'm gonna hover open the light editor well it's just called the ëthe light at it I don't know why says open you click on that and then you're gonna see this really fancy list so instead of going through the outliner or going to try to find a scenes Maya now has a light editor and it is very quickly you can select your lights and make changes here so for example if I wanted to increase my exposure of my lights to just be a little bit like 0.5 just a little more brighter I can just go in and change it very quickly this is fantastic if I want to increase my samples for rendering instead of selecting every single light I can just go in and change all of my settings not only that it will open up these lights you remember how I was opening up the outliner and trying to make all these changes well now you can just go in and click on these guys and it will show up here the attributes of the Lightman of the mesh light will show up over here so it's basically an outliner dedicated to lights so it's awesome I've always wanted something like this and this makes lighting a lot easier not only that you can create lights here as well if you choose to so hopefully that was helpful I know it was very quick and very fast but this is something that you will see me as I start going through more tutorials I will start using this also a little bit more so this is great too you can just select them all and then instead of clicking one at a time I can just go ahead and fix it in the next tutorial we are going to go into actually texturing these objects so thank you again for listening you can download this at academic Phoenix plus and if you would like while you're there sign up for my newsletter by signing up you will get free tutorials free pre-release content and a bunch of other perks so again thank you so much for listening i truly appreciate it and i will see you next time

Channel: Academic Phoenix Plus

Views: 73,239

Keywords: maya 2018 basics, maya 2018 lighting, maya 2018 lighting basics, maya 2018 tutorial, maya 2018 arnold, maya 2018 area light, maya 2018 incandescence, arnold incandescence, solid angle arnold, arnold for maya, light environment, sci fi environment, scifi, living room, autodesk maya, arnold mesh light, mesh light, emission, area lights, light editor, video tutorial, ed artist, star trek, free download, arnold renderer, texture

Id: 1MyoBjwIV64

Length: 17min 11sec (1031 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 20 2018