Autodesk Maya 2017 Arnold tutorial - Lighting & Rendering Introduction - TCW 2017

okay so this is gonna be an overview of rendering and with Arnold and Maya it's following the Creator workshop what we did in the last two meetings let's power up Maya just a sec okay so we have our model this is the models that we created any model we're gonna try to create some basic lighting render setup some camera and introduction to the pipeline to work and how to balance lights okay so first we have our model then we made with the modeling tutorials any model here will fit I created here a book box for a room we're gonna try to create this kind of window light here we this is just a cube inverted and extruded from this side and you can add lines if you want it's not the point in your so we're gonna start first with looking at what we're gonna do with with this scene we're gonna start with creating a new material and we're using Arnold so let's open the hypershade make sure you have Arnold enabled you can go to your Windows setting preferences plugin manager and load Arnold if it's not loaded and Arnold should be somewhere somewhere here MT oh so this you should load up if you don't have the Arnold render we're gonna first create a basic and I'm not gonna get into materials so much it we're just gonna take the Arnold material from here we're gonna use our standard one ai standard and the only change we're gonna do to the materials we got a preview here the only change we're gonna try to make it completely diffused and the reason for that is so we can see on a diffuse material they shouldn't be so the highlights shouldn't go there always diffuse over like this we can measure the maximum light or give us a start point for balancing the lights in the scene so I'm gonna put the diffuse weight into 100% and keep it like this not with the roughness okay so that's the only thing we're gonna do and the next thing we're gonna assign this material to everything in our scene I'm gonna select everything from the viewport you can select it from the outliner and just either from the hypershade right click assign material to selection or you can just stand here and right-click you should have a sign existing material and it should show up here the problem with this list they get long so maybe not the most comfortable way you can also middle Mouse drag and drop the material and that's all we're gonna deal with the materials we have a very diffuse materials and the reason for that is so we can balance the light so we can see when the light burns our scene it should be completely white just make sure the material units white okay so now that we have this we're gonna try first but just by clicking here for a render to see what we get and we should get a black screen because there is no lights in the scene but if I would look here on my render view on the Alpha Channel I see that it does render there's just no lights in the scene so I'll put it back here to RGB to the colors over here to click for alpha and now I also need to set up a camera and this we will go through this whole introduction all the process and create a few lights with Arnold go a bit of an overview but all those things will go a lot more in-depth in later tutorials this is just to get the basic workflow into that we start having a nice render a realistic render of this room set up with our models I'm gonna just start by creating lights and I'm gonna create directional not even opening the settings I should have it here in the scene a directional light is imitating sunlight it's a parallel light I will scale it a little bit so we can see where it is if I press 7 on my keyboard or click here I would get the lights how the light works so this is a kind of preview to see the lighting I will just rotate it now the direction light it doesn't matter where it's at at the scene because it's just a parallel light is it completely straight so but I would move it just for visual to understand how the scene is lit to the side although it can stay in center be small it doesn't matter also its scaling doesn't is not important physical scaling so I'm moving it somewhere maybe even closer I want to get this kind of sunlight sunlight coming in from the window now also in the preview mode I can also set here to see shadows and then I can see how the shadows are dropping so I'm already getting a interesting enough result and the idea here is to maybe tweak it a bit longer and we should look at it through our camera to get more exact just gonna maybe a little bit I think this should be okay enough what I wonder this is a rough preview of this light and now let's try to render it now although I added a light most likely we won't see much okay we do a little bit now since we're gonna have to create a camera to look inside the room we don't care what's going on the outside we are getting a bit of nice shadows or the basic setup for the scene with this light the only thing that is relevant for us if I'll increase the intensity and look up to test render I don't need to render the whole shot again I can just marquee select an area and click on render region I increase the intensity although most of our light controls are found in the Arnold and that's what we care about the rest here is not so important another thing the directional light doesn't have a decay rate because it's it's a constant I will open the Arnold tab and that's the only thing that we're interested in I will click on the used color temperature and this basically imitates Kelvin a temperature of the light so 6 5 500 is kind of daylight feeling we can take it down to 5 500 like tungsten change the lighting by this but this is a good for us because it's sunlight coming from the outside exposure will also control the intensity of the light so maybe it is something sometimes better you to control it from here angle will work on shadows we won't it will explain this later sample of the this is the quality of the shadows samples you should always deal with in very small steps here is I have the cast shadows all those details for now because this is an introduction we are only caring about the color temperature exposure to set up the light and how the light is admitted so this is so far with our first light here in the same and maybe I will increase it a bit more oh this was a number and the exposure a little bit up I'll first do a test render a small one I can always use the IPR as well now the render does look noisy which we don't mind this is about increasing the sampling which we'll deal with later okay okay so now we're gonna start with creating a camera just so we have a view I'm gonna close the renderer create cameras just a basic camera I see it here in my perspective if I want to look through it I will personally pull it out here where I can see it better if I want to look through the camera I go here panels perspective camera one or I can do look through selected because I have it selected and this is where I see now one important thing about the camera if we open the attributes control a I already had it open we need to just so we see how our camera looks like we need to go to our display options check the display resolution so we see the resolution our 960 540 and I will also increase the over scan so I can see the full frame I'll see exactly the framing and I think so the over scan just pushes it a bit back I can also change the color of the gate and it's transparency so if in case I want to have it all that's it black but common settings are great okay so since I'm looking through the camera I will also just one more thing with the camera I will change the focal length to 50 and then just position it kind of quick and interesting composition I am viewing the shadows I will just disable them for a second also the lights the idea is when I have my camera I can really work on the lighting and know the angle and let's say something like this maybe a little bit more okay this should be good enough for now if I want to bookmark this camera so I can remember so in case I move it by mistake when I'm jumping in between perspective I can have here view bookmarks edit bookmarks and I'll call this when I give it a name so frame composition zr1 and when I click enter it's in the shelf so now the good thing about this is if I by mistake or whatever I change my camera view I can go here view bookmarks comp 1 and I'm back to this view alternatively you can keyframe your camera into this position okay so another nice way that I like to work is to have two viewports one will be on our perspective which it is already another one will be on our camera viewport now in this case you see the overscan is not enough so I see the full frame I'll press here 5 so I see it in shaded mode and I will select the camera and I will change the overscan in our display to 1.5 even enough to see it I usually also like to tear off the attributes okay so we have one light directional light we can see it in the preview lighting by pressing seven how it works now I'm going to increase the light till I get to see when I'm hitting the highest the highlights get burnt because I have a diffused material I will just now do it again render now the render settings here are on the default the Arnold default you can reset your setting if you get different results it's very noisy which will we're not consumed concerned with now so as I can see I'm still okay I think the lighting is quite balanced but let's just try to increase it to see so I can increase it either by the exposure I just even take it further or by the intensity this is already burning it because I have a defusing my own material I shouldn't get so burnt but like this relatively okay for the starting point I'm just balancing the lights next point we're gonna do is we're gonna add another light to create this as if a light is bouncing back we do get a bit of a halo here but we're I'm gonna just try to amplify that the light is coming back from the wall and bouncing back so we get a bit of a backlight for this I'm gonna create lights and this time gonna create an area light now the area light the nice thing and when I work on two windows I can pressing F to frame it I can see now the area light has a physical space as you can see in a shape this line shows two were each direction it's pointing so we need to exactly reverse this I'm going to turn this 180 I just turned randomly by hand and I will just make sure the number in the channel box is 180 and then I will position it on the wall just on it and I'll try to kind of scale it to approximately the size of the light that comes from the window I'm just trying to create a kind of a bit of a bounce light a little bit more okay thing is if I will do now a render just give it a second I don't see much difference I don't actually know how much this light is interfering because I have the other lighter on and it's much more dominant for the sake of balancing the light and I think that it's a nice way to work it's just just to take the first light and switch it off so we can see what this light does and like this it's much easier to work individually and each light and see what its contribution to our lighting scheme is I will just now go into my outliner and I will take the directional light and in the attributes I will take its intensity to zero and I should already see the difference I'll just render a certain area so now I see without this light so basically the area light that I put is giving us very little if at all any light so what I will start doing now alternatively we can also use the IPR which will render on the fly it's like a live view of our render changes it is if you have a older machine or a slower machine it's not the best use I will try so for now I can change the intensity here I'm in the area light I select the very light in the outliner and I can change the intensity here which you'll do in effect say I'm already seeing something but I would prefer to let's take this back to one and I will go into Arnold again the main thing when we deal with lights is to deal with Arnold tap use the light temperature and I'm keeping it as the same 6500 and the exposure I'll increase the exposure in order to increase the light so now I see it is starting to give me some kind of nicer they'll do a combination I push this to 5 I'll push this to 3 so now we see it lights here up on the floor it's too much is exaggerated and it gives me a bit of this light so I can see this light is contributing it is maybe a bit too strong but just to illustrate this effect so it lights up make this I will maybe take the exposure a little bit down okay so now I will just go back to my outliner and select the directional light and I will put back the intensity I think it was I do want to get a kind of glowy feel later on now this light that we put here the area light does give a contribution but it's very very slight but that's that's kind of a basic with this now the overall light balance that we're doing here we will have to tweak it once we have the textures and the materials done but it's just to give us a starting point and to do all the lighting maybe you push this a bit more when I'm stronger okay I will switch off the IPR okay gonna just for the idea I'm gonna duplicate the slide control D and I'm gonna move it sideways so this is gonna mimic like it press also seven here so I see that right don't so it's somewhere here and I will lower it down this one maybe I can scale this light a bit down now I'm not gonna exactly check the lighting on this because it's just quick to overview but we'll try another render and I will move here to use default material so we can see the scene more clearly another test render so basically now we have two area lights bouncing from the window that hits the wall which is a directional light okay so we do get a bit of a glow from those two lights of course in the real situation we would have to get this more exact another problem I have now I want to see a window usually when it lights there will be some kind of glow around or a bit of light spill around the windows so what we're gonna do now is duplicate yet the area light again control D I'm going to bring it to where my window is and I will also I'm pressing spacebar to just have the whole view port on perspective and this is 90 degrees rotation what I'm gonna do now is put this light pointing over the window from the outside and I will scale it to kind of wrap the whole window from the sides I will also distort it a little bit somewhere around now this should be way too bright of course but let's try it anyways I will load the last render and I will just marque this area it's also nice to sometimes render or half so you can see the difference between the two I'll render this region and look if this gave me much of see it's a little bit brighter so it doesn't influence I can I could probably crank this up a little bit more alright okay for now let's keep it on this base another thing outside the window we see you know it's an alpha Channel I will create a plane I'll scale it up I will also flip it 90 degrees so this here later on I would put some picture of the sky or whatever in the render for now I'm just gonna block our window so I'm looking all the time through the camera to see how it fits because this is a still render so we should always be efficient and work only on the camera of you not do other elements so when I have this plane now I have one big problem it will probably affect the lighting it will the shadows it might drop so so we need to take care of that before that I will also assign it material and this time we're not gonna go with them materials from Arnold I'm gonna take the my surface shader because I want just to have a color without any effect on the light so I create a surface shader here you know it might create menu in the hypershade and then I will take this and assign it to the plane like an either middle Mouse drag and drop it there and this should be in or right click assign material to selection once I have this I will open the attributes or I can see them here in the hypershade and I will change ok and I will change the color into a kind of bluish white exaggerated here this should give us this backdrop now if I will render at this moment the geometry itself will be placed as a part of the lighting so this should hide some light which is maybe not the results we want to get definitely not the results we want to get so we have a surface shader I just want to check it you know now we have the right color okay so I just put this color on it and then in the attributes again I select the geometry in the attributes of the geometry if I will go to render stats and I will here you have all the settings for rendering so I will take out cast shadows because we don't want this plane to cast a shadow it is there just to put a background or a picture it doesn't need to receive shadows primary visibility we do need the motion blur doesn't affect this here because we don't have any motion blur we can take it off primary visibility means that it does render if I take this off it'll be here but you'll never render so we are putting this back in yeah visible reflections refractions are okay for us so let's now try this rendering okay so we get to see this preview with our background here now I should I can still push the lighting a lot further because I'm not maybe here I'm a little bit burning things but I could still increase them so we overall we have one directional light from the outside two area lights bouncing back from the walls to create a little bit of a glow which of course needs to be a bit worked on and made it exact and we have another one around the window which still needs to be increased so this is kind of the basic layout to make a lighting now from the render settings if we see all this grain will just show very quickly how to increase the quality so we open our render settings we'll go in the Arnold renderer and index sampling we should increase this if you take it to more production-quality you take it to 10 let's increase these to 4 and we don't have subsurface scattering we don't have we have fractions we can also crank it up that should be it ray depth is also something interesting for us in the quality for now I will leave it on the standard that should eliminate it'll take a lot longer to render so be careful with this settings you should only do this at the end and don't mind the noise learn to work with the noise it'll save you a lot of time okay so as you can see this does really clear out most of the noise our lighting if you see it's a very quick setup but I already see here around the phone that we might be burning it a bit too much because I'm losing details and this material is completely diffused again it could be the results that I do want to get that to have some highlights and burned because at the end when we laughter we'll put the materials and textures and work on the lighting we do want to get this kind of a dreamy Sun window light setup scene but for now we just actually well we wait for the surrender we just or it's already shows the smoothness I'll do another render afterwards to clarify it we still have a lot of if you see the shadows are very sharp we have a way to treat that all this we will get into I just want to try now to maybe play with a bit last time with a balance of the light and then I'll put a smoother render for this shut this down if we go into our area light we use the same temperature we just the only thing we adjusted was the exposure we can still play on the sampling to increase the quality we can also sometimes say some of those lights will just bounce some light and not drop any shadows so this should be also a factor other than that that's what the lighting is relatively simple now we do have another thing that we didn't treat this lights they're actually like did not have a decay all these lights I can give them a decay rate in this example there are no the Canes are just continuing forever by the intensity once I will put decay on them and the decay rate is actually either controlled here or once I enable this there is a decay rate and it's written here in the Arnold setting so they are indicated a quadratic which is the most realistic a constant means it's all the time on the same drops the same level this is the same the constant in linear are the same when we are switched on we're working with Arnold we are using this is where it decides the decay rate not this one so we do have this enabled but if for quicker renders I could switch this off and actually just give a halo here no shadows and just a decay for these area lights that bounce back I will now just increase maybe this this lights a little bit I am just a little bit increasing the intensity of all the area lights and the rest I'm keeping the same I will create a last light and this time it'll be a point light and I will just put it in the ceiling so maybe the best I will look through in perspective I'm pressing F to frame it you see where it is so this should imitate kind of a point light in the room now we don't want to put a lot of lights I am already put into show but usually if you build a scene you can have interesting lighting with a few lights it's all about you can have objects bounce light back and things of that sort okay point light is approximately where it should be what I could do now is again how I should do it is to lower all the lights and just increase the intensity of this one to see how it affects the scene I would also in the case to save time I will go back to my camera one and I will just deal with Arnold again use color temperature and will increase here the two four and in the color temperature I'm gonna change it to 5500 that should be a bit more tungsten 5,000 okay so we get it kind of more warm yellow light a bit different than the rest so it is we get this window light and I'm adding a little contribution of a point light as if a ceiling light to fill it in a bit the corners I could also add some lights from the others like a door here would have a light come in here to make it more interesting this is of course to add but here we're just trying to show the principle and it could be not even a life could be just in the shape that the light will drop through and yet this one I think it's okay let's also increase the exposure and I will do a quick day I'm not testing it on its own I'm gonna do a quick test render so I will load the last render and I will just render this region to see what it changed also another way a nice way of working is to save to save your images you can save your images here and then compare the two with a slider which we'll do next you just have the settings now more smooth so that so there is a contribution I can already see here you also get this color a bit yeah it'll be enough for now what I will do now is I will render the whole shot you just look a little bit at the render know this so this is the basic render we did remember we have just one material and everything which is completely diffused one thing to notice you if you see the shadows here are under the table or here those are coming because of the area lights no it will probably be best to actually disable shadows from those lights because we don't want to have a shadow dropping we can of course the sampling is very low that's why we get it noisy it will become softer if we will add sampling but the purpose of these lights as you can see here which is a good example that how they fill in back from from the wall is if it's a high light that comes in and they illuminate areas around so we strengthen this should illuminate around the chair a little bit I suggestion is and these are the things to play in by taste is to switch off the shadows it'll also render faster or diffuse them the other light if you saw the point light we put here on top of the scene that fills in a bit here we don't want to have completely dark corners and if we look at the highlights here where the its strongest because we have a diffused material when we'll start putting in real materials we might have to tone a little bit the lights down they might be already burnt but this is what we're testing we're trying to get a nice balance of course this is a quick setup but you should pay attention to set it up more correctly and again removing those shadows adding other lights also the light that we put here you might not see it there is a little bit of a definition here that we need to soften up which is now but this also when materials and textures comes this light setup will a bit change but this is a great way to start with one material it works faster work light by light see that its contribution to the scene and then try to create a kind of more or less balanced scene with this when we have this render done in the render view we want to save it so one way to do it is just to click on our save picture and then how I'm able to if I had two of them I will be able to scroll and see exactly Francis which is a nice way to compare renders if I would like to save the image I will just do file save image and either colored manage or raw image and I will save it just one one thing to note if for some strange reason he rendered and you are not in the one-to-one ratio so our zoom is 0.58 if I will save it now it will save it in this ratio and it will look distorted so you always have to either click here one-to-one to see the exactly if you want to save it in the exact resolution so this is just a note okay so this is just quickly to show a quick buildup of lighting for the room a bit of a setup of a camera and a material which is diffused all those lighting materials we and rendering we will continue into detail

Channel: CtrlArt creative content in motion

Views: 75,622

Rating: 4.951673 out of 5

Keywords: lighting, rendering, arnold, maya 2017, arnold for maya, lighting pipline arnold, arnold for maya tutorial, the creator workshop, creator workshop 2017, ctrlart, maya tutuorial, autodesk maya 2017 rendering tutorial, render, render setup, slovenia, ljubljana, workshop, 3d workshop, ctrlart workshops, Arnold renderer, directional lights, point light in maya, area light in maya, arnold lights, nadav sagir, Autodesk maya 2017, lessons, 3d lesson, education, software education, 3D model

Id: czVXj4ydlbM

Length: 36min 22sec (2182 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 22 2017