Interior Lighting in Maya 2022

hey guys it's monica at academic phoenix plus and welcome to a lighting tutorial this has been a request actually several times by multiple subscribers asking to do an interior lighting scene set up using arnold in maya all right so this is our scene so far i just threw in together some assets that have built in the past so for example this is the posh tutorial where you can build the chairs the vase the table so and so forth i also during inktober i modeled this uh fireplace with these assets the mirror i just threw this in really quick and i also added some wood panels now it doesn't have a ceiling clearly but that was just to demonstrate to you guys what it looks like right now with a physical sky so just in case you guys don't know under arnold lights there's something called physical sky which will wrap your scene in this dome that has a gradient of gray to blue and it mimics sunlight and it looks great if there was no roof so it's perfect for exterior lighting but when we talk about interior lighting we suddenly get a different type of look so let's go ahead and render what this looks like with just a physical sky from outside a little bit more about the scene i did have create a camera so i created a create camera camera and i called in my render cam so if i go to a panel's perspective render cam you're going to see that this is the camera that i want to render in so this one doesn't have the roof and now i am going to render the scene now this does take about 35 seconds so in this video's tutorials like i'm going to go ahead and hit pause on the recording so you guys don't have to wait but what you guys can do is that i'm going to press play it's going to re-render the scene so for you guys it will be microseconds and for me it's going to be a couple of seconds so i will be right back all right tell the difference that having a ceiling and a wall is not the best for lighting so we definitely need to fill this light this environment in with more light so that's what this video tutorial is going to show you so let's start off with the outside when we look outside we rarely have a gradient color so what we want to do is add maybe a plane so i'm going to go ahead and rotate this negative 90 degrees and what i'm going to do is just take it out here [Music] and kind of expand it so that when you render it this is what you're going to see i'm going to go over here to look two views and i'm going to go to panel uh render cam on one side it's a little hard to see but i'm going to go ahead and squeeze them together so i can see a little bit more and you can see that there's like a gap so i'm going to take this and just kind of scoot it to the back so again my goal is to make sure that this panel uh fits the background of our scene i already found an image that i want to put in the background so i'm going to go to right click assign a new material and i'm actually going to use an old shader that has been around in maya since probably the beginning of time and it's called the surface shader it's not an arnold shader it's actually a maya shader so the surface shader what's great about it is that it doesn't have any shadow or highlight information so it doesn't render uh based on the lighting so this is very important because we wanted the background to be flat as we manipulate the lighting we don't want the background to be affected so over here to the right we have out color i'm gonna click on this little checker go to file go to the little folder and what i have is a tree background but i actually blurred it in photoshop so that it looks like something whoops looks like it's in the background and it's not very distracting i'm going to go ahead and rotate this as well 180 degrees [Music] and let's see what that looks like all right it is done let me take a snapshot of that and you can see what a big difference it makes when you see one from the other uh we get some nice reflections on the glass surface here and along other things so it's uh it really adds realism to our scene okay so i'm not gonna need the sky dome anymore so go ahead and grab that sky dome and delete it and let's see what this render looks like without a skydome so you can see that it's very dark you can it is picking up some really nice reflections which i like but boy is it dark so we definitely want to make sure that we add some lighting so let's build our own lighting i'm going to start off with a sunlight usually what i do is i'm going to go to create light and i'm going to use what's called a directional light now the directional light which you can't see i'm going to go to show lights there it is i'm going to scale it now don't worry about scaling it because it it won't affect the actual lighting so what the directional light does is that it in fact emits a light on one direction for infinity and this is great because it will give us parallel shadows so using a directional light is perfect for the sun now it's a little hard to see so i'm going to turn on this light source which is number seven and then you can click on this and this will give you a shadow and this is a preview and the preview will help you place the lighting as to where do you want it to go and i highly recommend that you guys think about where do you want your lighting to be and also what time of day do you want the focus to be perhaps on the painting then this would be a great opportunity to put your light like this something that really accentuates the painting or perhaps you're actually focusing on the chairs right so this is where storytelling comes in you want to be able to tell a story on what's going on with lighting what do you want them to focus maybe there's something interesting in the fireplace things like that so i'm actually going to focus a little bit more on the chairs as well as the painting just a little bit now remember it also depends what time of day it is the lower the sun the longer the shadow so if you're trying to create like a sunset then you would have long shadows if you're trying to say that it's around noon and it's nice and bright then i'd probably would suggest that you make your shadows short so you know take a look at reference when you guys are lighting so i'm going to go ahead and do something like this and let's see what that looks like so you i didn't let it finish because i'll just go ahead and show you this is what it looks like right now and i kind of like what it's doing right here as well as over here of course it's still very dark but again i'm just placing my light source this is going to be my key light source this is my sunlight so let's talk a little bit about the directional light so now that i have this type of lighting and maybe i'll just go more like this so the floor has a little bit more of a pool we can talk about intensity and color color is exactly what it sounds like i can change this to like a teal and it will change the color to a teal now i want this to be sunlight so i am going to choose a little bit of something more now you you really want to try to avoid choosing um just pure white because the reality is is that there isn't really pure white light out there usually there's some sort of color and you also want to play with color i mean that's the point of being like a lighting artist is that you want to be able to tell a story through light so change the color using color we can also increase the intensity of our light so for example if i increase my intensity to 2 you can see that the preview has already changed and it's a little bit brighter but let's see what that looks like in a render all right so you can compare the difference that and i move the light a little bit you can tell the difference between one and the other one's a little bit brighter and it's a little warmer which is exactly what i want i wanted to emit yellow light all right let's talk about shadows let's open up the directional light and let's go to arnold let's open this up exposure is going to come in handy what's going to happen is that exposure will exponentially increase whatever you have in your intensity if you guys go to the autodesk arnold documents it will break down the light system for you so if you want to know more information about what exactly is color temperature you can find out here and i also have a video about it as well to break it down so if you guys are interested i'll leave a link below and what we really want to talk about is the exposure so the exposure basically means that it takes the color times the intensity and then exponentially increases it by two so for example if you have an intensity of one and an exposure of four then it's going to say that the color is one is white the intensity is one it exponentially increases it by four so the number is 16. now the funny thing is is that you can do the exact same thing with intensity so for example if the color is white and you change it to 16 and leave the exposure to zero then it's 16. so they work together you can get the same results with just intensity but the reality is is that you can use less values and bigger effects if you just use the exposure so i have a tendency to use the exposure a lot if you want more information about the light please take a look at arnold's documents they are awesome all right so that is lighting temperature and exposure let's talk about an angle so as i zoom in just like you do on a regular object you're going to notice that the shadows of this uh directional light are really sharp the reality is is that that's not accurate to realism you really need some sort of softness in the shadows and that's where angle comes in so for example if i go ahead and change my angle to 2 and i'm going to make a selection here just so that it renders only that portion you'll notice that the shadow is now a lot softer this is very important so the longer the shadow the softer the shadow so the higher your angle the shorter the shadow so for example if it's noon the sharper it's going to be so you want a smaller angle i'm going to leave mine at 2 and let's see what that looks like hit 1 1 to see the whole thing and let's take a look all right you can see that it is looking really nice the shadows are not as sharp and what's really great is that notice how sharp the shadow is up here and as it gets further away from the light source the shadows get softer and that's actually really nice now the issue is the noise the whole scene has a lot of noise but the shadow itself has a lot of noise so let's talk about samples so samples in the directional light means that it will spend more time making sure that there's less noise in the render so let's go ahead and increase that by three i probably wouldn't go any higher than three or four and then let's see what that looks like now my render right now is 46 seconds this will maybe increase my render time a little bit but let's see what it looks like all right that took 51 seconds so just by increasing the samples it will increase your render time and this is just one light but what's important to note is that the quality of the shadow is significantly nicer there is still noise caused by the indirect lighting but as you can see the shadow itself is a lot softer and it looks really nice awesome now with that we have a understanding of what the directional light does let's move on to start lighting the rest of the room it's looking pretty dark let's go ahead and brighten up the rest of the room and let's talk about fill light the sun is not the only thing that emits light there's a lot of indirect lighting coming from the sky and also from the trees and everything so there's just a lot of light bouncing around so we need to mimic that go to arnold light and we're gonna use the area light my favorite light and i'm gonna make it a little bit bigger and bring it into the scene and you'll notice that this little light has this little line sticking out of it that's perpendicular sticking out of it that is the direction of the light so to satisfy the needs of this environment or this light i'm going to go ahead and make it the size of the window this is supposed to be my window light this is supposed to mimic the sky so let's just take a look make sure it's not too big because there's no reason to light the back of it and before i forget um this is a piece of geometry which could potentially block your light so what i'm going to do is go into arnold and i'm looking at the plane shape you want to turn off cast shadows self shadow so you don't want it to cast any shadows if light hits it you do want to see reflections you do want to see refractions you do want to see transmission and all that stuff but you definitely don't want to have it actually cast a shadow bring it inside the environment and again i'm going to make it just a little bit smaller and the first thing i do is turn off normalize normalize means that it doesn't consider the scale when you increase the scale the intensity remains at one so it spreads the diffuse or the intensity out through this whole area however if you turn it off it makes the whole thing intensity of one i have a whole tutorials on on lighting like specifically each single light and i'll link it below but in general i wanted to turn that off and let's see what that's gonna look like so right off the bat we're getting some really nice lighting my shadows are working this is what it was before i'm really getting the nice fill light and i'm really happy with that now of course i can make it better i personally like to use color to enhance my scenes so for example you guys already know about color intensity exposure i'm going to turn the temperature on and just kind of make it a little bit warmer and the warmer i'm trying to make it more like a skylight this will help make the environment feel a little bit like the sky is coming in and adding some blue shade to it so let's see what that looks like all right that's a little too blue let me uh decrease that actually let me turn off use temperature and i'm just going to eyeball it i don't even know why i use i only use temperature when i'm trying to light like candles so i'm really not sure why i'm trying anyway i just want to demonstrate it to you uh let's see let's add a little bit of blue not too much blue just a hint so you'll notice that the change is very subtle it does make it a little bit cooler but the effect is nice because now i have warm lighting and blue light coming in so it's a nice touch so it depends what you're trying to go for let me go ahead and take a snapshot of this and move forward you'll notice that in the render on the right side it's really dark and we also have we want to also have lighting coming from another light source which is the bounce light so let's add another area light arnold lights area light usually what i do is that i like to make sure that this the light itself the bounce light actually emits ben's light so the way i handle those type of bounce lights is that i make a light and i place it where you know the sunlight hits so that means that it hits around the floor and it also hits around the ceiling this is going to help increase the intensity of the light so i'm going to go ahead and make this light source relatively large it's not going to be very intense actually let me go in here and change my dimensions here so let's make sure everything's nice and straight uh something around here again don't forget to go to normalize and i do want this light to be a little bit warm if you want to you can color pick this color so i mean that's kind of kind of fun so you can just grab this nice color usually it gets a little dark so i like to lighten it a little bit more so that it becomes brighter the darker the color the less light it emits and i'm going to duplicate this light control d and i believe this one's negative 90 degrees this is going to be my tiny pillow light over here it's not going to be too intense just want to make sure that this also emits light now since i duplicated ctrl d it's going to have the same color it's going to turn off normalize and might make it just a little bit smaller and squid it to the left something like that let's see what that looks like all right so you can see that this environment is getting brighter this is what we had before this is what we have now now there's a couple of things i do want to tackle next which is we're getting a lot of refraction and it's being picked up by reflections and because we have chrome it causes issues so the only thing i want this to do is to give it light to the diffuse i don't want it to be caught in hot like in highlights for example my key light is my window that's the only thing that should be reflecting and it's the only thing that should be the reflections so i'm going to scroll down to visibility and what i'm going to do is turn off my specular you see how it says specular and i slid it to zero i'm going to do that to this one as well and i'm gonna do it to this one as well and the reason why is because all of this is considered bounce light my main light is my key light this has was emitting at the beginning really nice reflections right like around here so i want to make sure i keep that so let's see what that looks like the change is very subtle but you'll notice that it is no longer blowing out the glass it's no longer being picked up by a lot of things in general the reflection is all being caught by the pool of light now if you do like some of the specularity so for example i did kind of like that specularity here you can bring it back it is your choice this is an artist's choice so that means that if you feel like maybe you do want a little bit of the specularity then you are more than welcome to bring that up now the bottom of the chair is blowing out so the way you can tackle that is by either making the light smaller and maybe even duplicating it so it doesn't affect it or what you can also do it's called the light blocker so a light blocker is considered a filter so down here at the bottom of this area light i'm going to add a filter and i'm going to add what's called the light blocker the light blocker creates this tiny little transform by the way you can find it here under transform and what i want to do is use this to block the light so for example i'm just going to make it a little bit larger i'm scaling it i'm making it bigger and i really just want to block the bottom of the chair and to be fair i only want a little bit of it so let me just go in and just do a little bit of changes here just to make sure the blocker fits well underneath the chair something like this maybe a little bit thinner because again it's just the bottom of the chair that actually looks pretty good cool and i'm going to increase the density and i'm also going to increase the height and the ratio now again i have a video tutorial on what all of this does but what happens is that it will darken this area here so if you find it to be you know there's something that you find that the light is blowing out you can use a light blocker so let's see what that looks like so let's compare and contrast you can see how bright it is let's turn that off you can see that it's uh it's making an impact if you want a stronger impact we can always select it and increase the density and also well just increase the density all right it definitely looks better much more natural all right so now that we have basically the window and all the bounce lights around it let's go ahead and talk about this dark area the other side so this is where you can add another area light again i mentioned that these are my favorite lights they seriously are my favorite lights let's go in and give them a give this area an area light i'm going to make sure that it's rotating over here and this is basically going to be my interior lighting so we're assuming that there's going to be some sort of light source perhaps there's another window over here you just kind of have to be a little bit creative but just make your light you know recently reasonably big go ahead and turn off normalize and then if you like i would recommend that you give it a color again you can choose a little bit of it depends what you're trying to achieve you can choose a little bit of warm you might want to go a little bit more in the orangey side um depends what type of lighting you want on your scene let's see what that looks like all right this is what it was before and you can see what a big difference that light does so i would call this ikea catalog lighting that's what i would call this and the reason why is because everything's very even you can see everything clearly there isn't that much mood to it the purpose of the lighting is to be able to see all of the hard work and furniture that you created so if you wanted to give it a little bit more mood you might want to consider changing the color so for example maybe you might want to go for a little bit more red and make it a little bit more pink so there's like a little bit of a gradient now pixar blue sky dreamworks they all it's all about gradients with them so keep that in mind is if you want to be like a lighting artist but you really want to make sure that you you add colors like almost like saturated colors and i am going to decrease the intensity just a little bit so that it doesn't really distract from my hot spot over here i really want to make sure that everything kind of bounces and works together and i also have fur by the way so my carpet is not this weird little flat thing and the runner time will take longer but let's see what it looks like with a little bit more color a little bit more mood all right let's take a look here we are we this is what we had before i did not snapshot the other one oh well so you can see that it's a little redder on the one side a little bit more yellow in the other if it's a little too strong you guys can always change it but i'm kind of digging it so that is how you do an interior lighting so let's take a look at what we have so far this is what it looked like without the ceiling and then we decided to go ahead and start giving it a background adding our own light source we started playing with directional lights playing with the shadows started adding the fill lights and then finally we have this really completed scene great but we still have a lot of noise you can see that there's noise over here which i call fireflies which the industry actually calls fireflies it's also officially noise there's noise in the shadows here and there's a lot of noise everywhere so we really want to make sure that we create a really nice quality render and to do that we need to go to our render settings let's go to our render settings and change my image size to 720 i do want to make sure that i render from the render cam i'm going to go to arnold and crank up these values now i have a video tutorial explaining what this is all about but if you want high quality renders you want to make sure that you increase these values i don't think i have subsurface so i'm going to go ahead and turn that off turn on adaptive sampling and you might want to increase that up a little bit higher if you do have glass which i don't have glass in my windows i have a little bit of glass here you might want to open up braid depth and just kind of increase these a little bit more just to make sure that things are looking good and i will be right back all right and here it is a nice quality render it took about 30 minutes to render so just keep that in mind that just because we get some really great renders they will take a while to render so when you increase those attributes make sure that you are ready to take a break and enjoy a snack or something because it's going to render for a long period of time all right so where else can we improve our settings well we want to improve our settings isn't that lights themselves so up here at the top we have uh what's called the light editor and you'll notice that all of my lights are actually there now these point lights are in fact in my in here so you don't even see them because i hit them and the reason why is because i'm going to do a video tutorial on how to create evening lighting or romantic lighting later on but what i wanted to show you guys is that this window the light editor you can go in and change what's called the samples now we did that already for the directional light but what we didn't do was increase the samples for the area light so i'm going to go in and just change the samples to three this is also going to help increase the quality of the render and there you go all right guys thank you so much for watching i really appreciate it hopefully you guys learned about how to create interior lighting we went over directional lights we also went over filters we went over how to create your own sunlight how to create the bounce lights and so much more so hopefully you guys learned a thing or two if you did please like and of course subscribe because that is your message to me letting me know that you're interested in these videos and you want to see more also if you feel like this video will be helpful for somebody out there maybe your friends your peers or even your instructors please share that would be amazing take a look at academicphoenixplus.com where you can find free downloads free ebooks free trainings and so much more so take a look at academicphoenixplus.com again thank you so much for spending the time with me keep creating and i will see you next time

Channel: Academic Phoenix Plus

Views: 5,046

Keywords: lighting, cg, 3d, computer graphics, interior lighting, maya 2022, autodesk lighting, basics, intro, introduction, how to, video, tutorial, light blockers, sun light, inside, sunlight, window

Id: 8myb1AUAZm8

Length: 24min 4sec (1444 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 19 2021