Maya 2017 - 3 Point Lighting in Arnold

hello there welcome to another exciting tutorial in Maya 2017 thank you very much for tuning in today it's an absolute privilege to have you here today thanks for taking the time to learn a little bit about Maya and today I'm going to be talking about the basics of lighting inside of Maya using Arnold and we're going to be lighting up this little character over here which I made a little while ago and I never kind of like finished him in anyway so I'll be providing you guys with a little file so that you can actually follow along the tutorial in the description notes below and today it's mostly going to be introducing about three-point lighting we're going to be using mostly spotlights and very basic lights inside of Arnold we're going to be playing around with placement their intensity the other effects that we can add into spotlights and we're gonna start showing you guys how to do renders that will be able to kind of like present and show off some of your 3d work in a really easy type of way that you can replicate for any other projects that you might actually have so let's dive straight into it one of the first things we need to do when we're setting up our scene for lighting is that we have to start thinking about the camera itself I've got my standard perspective camera over here as you can see which is quite nice and funky but we'll also want to create a new camera which will be the point of view that we're going to be using with Arnold to test our renders and I've already pre-made a camera like this which is ready for me to go but I'm going to show you how you can create a new camera so I'm gonna coat in two panels and I'm gonna go into perspective and at the bottom there's an option to choose new and this is gonna be a new perspective camera as you can see over here and what I want to do is just configure this view so that I'm really trying to light my scene from just one locked off camera so that all of your lights and everything that you're doing your scene they're mostly very much coordinated by where you position the actual camera itself so let's try a few kind of like little things for our setup over here now my camera's they replicate real-world cameras fairly well and there's certain things that you might want to play around with for example I've got something literatures the focal length of my camera over here which I can zoom in and zoom out of my little goblin over here by using my focal length if I chose a focal length let's say of 12 that's a very wide angle lens and if i zoom in to him you're gonna see that this is really gonna distort his face in quite a strange type of manner like that most of the time for projects he really want to use a little perspective distortion as possible you're normally trying to get somebody to approve your work and trying to get you to kind of like to give you the thumbs up that it's a good idea to keep going forward so I'm gonna choose an 85 millimeter lens which is quite narrow in and of itself and you see that over here everything kind of like looks very flat and kind of like normal again because all we have to do is just find ourselves a nice little frame like this over here and with roughly where we want the camera another thing that we want to make sure is that if I go up here into view and I look into my camera settings over here you're gonna see that there are some settings here whoops which is over here where I can turn on my resolution gate now if I choose my resolution gate that's gonna display inside of this rectangle over here exactly what Maya and Arnold are going to render so if I frame this guy and I trim the top of this head off like that from that rectangle I know that the render that is going to be trimmed off there's also a quick little button up here which is this little blue circle inside of rectangle which will also show me my um a little render region over here you're gonna see that this again kind of like doesn't exactly match what we see inside of our viewport so if we want to be specific about what our viewport plane actually looks like when we render we kind of like come in here and we just will decide an angle of where to do it you could be looking up kind of like if I just put my camera no into the floor per se but you could have an angle of him kind of like looking up we could have an angle of him looking down like that as well or just one that's kind of like straight ahead like this a three-quarter view like that now the camera itself is actually this perspective node over here we can actually rename it inside of here or we can go into our windows outliner and rename the camera to shot camp - because I already have one inside my scene over here there we go maybe I should have made it a little bit more different than the one that I already have over here but this camera view over here is what I'm actually going to render out now to avoid me making any mistakes if I come into the channel box over here and I select all of the properties of the channel box per se so just click and drag to actually select all of them like that and I right-click on them I can choose lock selected over here by right-clicking on any one of the properties I click lock selected now and if I use my viewport navigation tools you're gonna see that I can't zoom in I can't pan and I can't rotate the camera in any way because now all of these properties here are locked and they'll have this little blue color next to them over here just to show me that they're locked I can select them again and unlock them if I want to change the camera but it's very important to always decide your camera position before you go ahead and you start actually using lights you may have noticed today as well I'm actually on headphones I'm gonna try a new setup to actually record these tutorials especially since we're going to be using the Arnold render view over here and the fans on my laptop I'm going to keep going like crazy hopefully it won't look like my I'm about to take off as the but as the fans actually start going so what I'm gonna do is come over here and come into my standard perspective view over here and if I turn on the Arnold render view over here you're gonna see that I have a diffuse light already in my scenes he or should be completely black per se but this is one that I was playing around with earlier over here and you'll see that if I press pause over here I can actually choose which camera I'm actually rendering from inside of this drop-down menu over here so what I'm gonna do is change to my shot cam 2 over here and then what I'm gonna do is just come over and press this little play button inside of my render preview over here and it's gonna start rendering out my shot just like that with whatever space my little render view actually has like that if you find like in my case that this is right running around fairly slow what I'm gonna do is just stop this for a second and you can always come into your render settings over here and we can lower down the settings of our Arnold renderer so I might just choose at this stage to take my anti-alias into one so the preview actually runs fairly quickly but again the quality will be absolutely terrible it will be like looking at something that's covered in sand or very grainy but good enough for me to start lighting now you might be asking yourselves how on earth is the only seeing all of these kind of light lights in my scene when I've pretty much got a black screen by myself as I mentioned before if I had come into Windows outliner well I had just made a sky dome light inside of my scene just to preview what this set up would look like and actually you guys should have something that looks like this if you want to find out how to make a sky dome light you can look at our tutorial from last week from making shaders where I show you how to set one out very quickly and easy with the use of an HDR so if I press play this is much more like what you guys should be seeing on your screens over here and it's important for me to start off with something that's completely dark to start off with just because we're going to start lighting today with a very very very easy set of steps that I want you guys to follow the first thing is that we're going to start by actually lighting one step at a time and that means that we're gonna create a light get it into the right position play around with its intensity and its color and then we're going to it off and then we're going to make another light position it in the right place play around with its intensity and its color in its settings and then turn it off and always get into this habit of starting off as a beginner to light one light at a time and later on at the end we'll turn them all on and we'll see what tweaking we actually have to do it's a fairly simple method to actually follow but today I'm going to be talking specifically about what we call three-point lighting which is a great way for artistically displaying your work okay so I'm gonna make use of the grease pencil tool inside of mine just to give you guys a little bit of quick theory about lighting specifically when we're lighting portraits characters or products three-point lighting basically establishes that from where the camera is positioned which is down here inside of my over here and I've got my little subject over here the camera looks kind of like through here and we imagined that the image plane of our render actually looks something like that so that's kind of like where the image that we have in from our camera actually sits and rests well one of the important things that we have to start thinking about is in terms of where we position our lights we know who'll want to create a main area of lighting which will kind of like come over from one side of this character over here and this light over here which we're going to make is going to be the most important light inside of our scene this will be called the key light which will probably be the light that will be the brightest inside of the scene as it touches the surface of the object and it's also gonna be the one that's gonna provide the main illumination for our scene so most of the light is actually coming from here then what we're gonna do is that there will probably be another light inside of our scene over here which will come from the opposite side of the camera plane per se and this light over here which will be secondary in nature is what's going to be called the fill light because it's going to fill in the shadows that the key light produces over here so these lights you know you could think about them very mathematically like they're drawn at like 45-degree angles over here but they have in their own nature the simple thing that they could be positioned anywhere within this field except that one is counteracting the shadows of the other over there to make our light stand out from the background over here if I just choose another quick color from here there's gonna be another light that we're gonna use in our three point lighting setup which is going to be called surprise surprise a back light or sometimes some people call it a rim light per se now this back light you can position to begin with just pointing almost directly into the camera lens itself and that will create quite an interesting effect but the back light can be positioned almost anywhere as long as it's behind the actual subject that we're actually using and all of these lights in the three-point lighting setup which is why it's called three-point lighting the key the fill and the back work together to help enhance the lighting of the character or product that we have inside of our scene now you're gonna see that some of these lights will just be one light inside of Maya but other lights can actually be a combination of lights as well I could have three back lights back here or casting light onto our little goblin over here and all of these lights are actually considered to be the back lighting per se so even though it's called three-point lighting it's important for you guys to realize that really there's either a group of lights or the type of light is you're going in a specific direction or doing one specific type of job which I'm going to show you how it's starts off just by creating a key light with a light inside of Maya and showing you how we position all the other lights inside of my scene so we're gonna start our lighting by going into create lights just tearing off this menu over here for a sec and just to show you all of the standard Maya lights that we have over here which work beautifully with Arnold there's also some v-ray lights down here as well if you're looking for the specific Arnold lights as well there is another light menu inside of here which will contain all of the Arnold lights plus the standard Maya lights as well and Arnold has some interesting new features for these lights as well which we'll be talking about in just a little bit so what we're gonna do is I'm gonna create myself a spotlight to begin with which is a very simple type of light that very much just looks like a little torch on the ground per se like that if i zoom into this a little bit more might have to juggle around some of my windows so that you guys can get the maximum view possible you're going to see that this looks like a little cone like this which if I want to I should be able to scale up and down a little bit like that just to make it a little bit easier for you guys to see and I can move this light and position it in my scene so that I can actually see where it's going to be landing now inside of Maya if I turn on this light icon over here you're gonna see that in my viewport I get this preview of where my light is positioned per se and it's very important that Maya 2017 turns on lights and shadows which is this button over here separately so you see that I can actually again for memory efficiency kind of like keep my lights in my shadows separate if I so choose to so importantly my spotlight again is like a little cone of light like a torch and it's going to allow me to light up a specific area inside of my scene now to make things a little bit easier Maya's got a nice nice nice little command over here which is if I press the T button on my keyboard I'm gonna get a target Tifa target over here which is a little locator over here that I can click and drag and position somewhere on the face of my goblin I'm gonna come over here and I'm just gonna position this locator with the help of the camera just kind of like round here on his left cheek just like that to start off with and the great thing about this is traditionally if you want to turn this target off you can choose one of the move or rotate tools and it will snap back to being like in single mode which is that if I move this light around it's always pointing in the same direction if I rotate the light I'm changing its angle just like that but if I press T again my target is still roughly in the same place that I left it over there and what's gonna happen is again if I just position it a little bit more now if I move my light around I get this kind of like James Bond effect type of thing where you can actually see that the light is going to be moving around my scene but it's always pointing towards that same area over there so this is really handy for me because I've got kind of like viewpoint 2.0 I'm just gonna close this menu over here I'll bring it back later on when I need it it's going to allow me to preview where my lights are positioned while the interactive Arnold render view when I press play is going to show me hopefully my lights inside of my render view now the reason why this is not coming up yet is because my light isn't bright enough in my scene for me to be actually be able to see it illuminating my character over here so I'm just gonna turn off the owner render view for a sec and come into the lights attributes over here because there's plenty of little attributes that we can play around with in order to make our light visible inside of the render that would actually be included either inside this option over here which is called intensity which I can play around with a bit and that will make my light brighter or it will make my light dimmer as I see fit but I'm gonna leave that value at 1 if I want to play around with the intensity of my light I'm gonna go into the Arnold tab over here at the bottom of my light attributes and I'm gonna look for a property which is called exposure over here which is currently set to zero if I start incrementing the exposure inside of my scene you're gonna see that my scene starts getting brighter and brighter and brighter and if I added an exposure of ten over there you'll see there's no visible result inside of the viewport but if I come over here and I go back into Arnold and choose my Arnold render view you're now gonna see that my scene is going to start to render out just like this as you can see so now if I play around with the exposure over here and I press play over here whoa I boosted it up way way way way way way way too high if you want to get an interactive view of your scene like that just make sure that you've got your renderer set to IPR over here when you press that play button I can now start creating the main kind of like exposure for my light like this and you'll see that I'm illuminating the character and just a little bit of the background over here as well so you can see that I can create a really nice almost like statue like looking image over here now the key light which is this one over here which I am going to rename inside of my outline herbs and they're going to windows outliner select this spotlight over here I'm gonna call this key light just to keep everything tracked over here it normally wants to create the main illumination of my image just as its doing over here and one of the things that I want to do with it is that I will want to raise it up probably quite a bit like that so that it's actually pointing down on my character over here and at some point I should just see a little bit of light kind of like appearing here past his ginormous nose like that as well so when you're doing portrait photography or portrait lighting it's normally a good idea to kind of like have your light be actually fairly high up because it's gonna create some interesting shadows around the eyes and around the face as well I'm just gonna reload my Arnold render view over here and give it a little bit of time to cache like that there we go you see that now I'm getting some interesting shadows inside of the of here under the eyebrows over here you can see that part of the face is actually covered in shadows just like this again great thing about Arnold is that it allows us to actually move things around and again if I've got my IPR turned on as I move the light inside of my viewport I should see the light change slowly slowly slowly and progressively get better every time I start moving around my mouse like so so again I just kind of like come in here make sure that everything's like that and if you ever have any problems you can always hit update full scene and it will reload everything that's in here so again either using the viewport over here or using the Arnold render view you can very accurately position where your light is inside of your scene so I'm kind of happy with where that light is to an extent I'm actually trying to get as I said before just a little bit of light being Sean across his face like that I don't want his other ear to actually be there so again I'm kind of like just moving things around just a little bit keeping that other ear in shadow like that and there we go we've got kind of like most of his face illuminates it like that now the spotlight in Maya has quite a few settings as well which will work inside of Arnold as well predominantly if we want our cone angle to be larger or smaller that's gonna make a very wide spotlight like that it can make a very narrow one like that so cuz spotlights can limit where the light is being cast if I want it to illuminate my background as well I could consider making this a little bit larger but it's not something that I'm too worried about right now there's another two interesting properties as well which is one is the penumbra angle over here which allows me to add a little bit of a blur to the edges of my light just like that and then with the drop off I can actually create a gradient across the light itself so this is kind of like a very soft fuzzy type of light and if I make my light kind of like with less drop-off it's kind of like got a little bit of a harder to it now these properties have always been inside of Maya and one of the things that happens when you're rendering with Arnold is that your lights actually have a quadratic decay which looks very dark inside of my viewpoint 2.0 but we don't have to worry about playing around with these decay settings because inside the Arnold tab over here you'll see that the decay type is set to quadratic inside here as well and actually Arnold is overriding any settings that your standard Maya lights might have importantly some interesting features that Arnold has as well is that depending on what you're doing you can actually choose to lower the shadow density of your shadows here as well so if I came into Arnold and went again to my Arnold render view over here might be a little bit difficult to say see because we haven't got a lot of light inside of our scene yet but if I take the shadow density and I start dropping that down let's see if I can actually see if we can make our shadows over here just a little bit clearer like that you'll see that the shadows start disappearing like such so if I turn on the interactive view you can roughly see that the ears are getting just a little bit darker like that so you can actually customize how intense the shadows are just by using this little gimmick over here as well another nice little thing that we can do as well in Arnold as well is that Maya lights traditionally this point in space is just a dot so our Maya establishes that it's the origin of the spotlight it's just a little dot in space and that's not very realistic shall we say if we wanted to create a more realistic look to our lights one of the things that we can do is that we can actually give a little bit of a radius to this actual light itself and it will go all the way up from 0 to 1 I think we might be able to override it as well and make it larger so and then what this will do again I'm just gonna take it down to zero for a second press play over here to actually start up my render again so I'm gonna do an update scene again and let the IPR start running I'm gonna start increasing the light radius and you're gonna notice that that's gonna make the lights soft inside of my scene because one of the nice properties about Arnold is that if your lights are emanating from a single point in space they tend to be quite hard and give you these very hard shadows if your lights are actually very large in size they're gonna give off much softer shadows so what I'm gonna do is turn this down to a value of one so it's just a little bit soft per se I can see my computer is struggling away trying to keep kind of like the screen recording software and the Arnold IP are running at the same time so it's furiously trying to stop me from doing things but you'll see that we'll be able to kind of like come up with some nice soft lighting like that so again the key light is lighting most of my figure over here and one of the things that I'm going to do as well which is an Arnold property but you can also play around with inside of the colors section over here as well is that I could choose this light and I could add a color to it so I could perfectly choose to add an orange tone to this light just by playing around with these settings notice that when I add the color this is like the saturation value of my light you'll notice that this is white and this is purely saturated Orange there's very little orange that you need to add to make your light actually look like it is orange in color you could do this with any color of the rainbow as well I could turn this into a blue light as well but always when you're coloring lights make sure that you use a color that is very very very very close to white if you notice that's white in color and if I add just a little smidge of blue all of a sudden that effect of the blue is already nice big and noticeable as well so you can add any color of the light that you want over here but what I'm specifically gonna do is I'm going to use a nice warm yellow light if I want this scene to look a little bit realistic one of the things I can do is I can put this color back to white over here like so and what I'm going to do is use color temperature now color temperature is a natural occurring that happens in lighting so if I have a specific light it tends to have a value in degrees Kelvin which this six thousand five hundred degrees Kelvin is actually a very blue type of light which is actually very similar to outdoors type of light if I type in 555 5500 a very white looking light over here this is closer to what natural daylight looks like and if I start dragging this down you'll see that I'll get oranges slightly what's his name redder colors if I bring it down all the way to like a thousand Kelvin over here you're gonna see that we get this very kind of like red ember type of look as well so I'm gonna settle for five thousand for my initial spot light over here as well and if I want to I can still play around with the exposure just a little bit like that to make sure that I've got a nice contrast between my areas of light and shadow as well so what I'm gonna do is now that I've got my key light created I'm gonna start setting up my fill light to help me fill in these areas over here so what I'm gonna do temporarily is grab myself my spotlight over here and inside the attribute editor I'm gonna turn off the option it illuminates by default just to hide it away I just like having an on and off button over here and that's right at the very top of the spotlight attributes I'm gonna come into Arnold now and they'll look for lights and I'm going to choose an area light which if I use the scale tool it's going to look like this big rectangle over here with a little stick as you can see and that little stick is actually pointing in the direction that my light is gonna be traveling in so if I choose my spotlight again I'm just going to turn off eliminates by default and you should see that there's this very tiny glow light inside here because again like all lights this Arnold area light if I start cranking up the exposure it should start making my image brighter and brighter and brighter and brighter so I'm just gonna come over here that even though I'm not seeing any changes inside of my my viewport that could be that I still do have some changes inside of the render view so again it's always worthwhile checking these things so I'm gonna come over here and choose my Arnold render up here whoa there we go friend you can see yes indeed there is way way way way too much exposure so turn the lights down please there we go so as you can notice this also creates light very much like a spotlight as well but you'll see that the light looks quite different in nature as well if I just angle this off to a side and I'm gonna position it in my view as best I can if you're having trouble seeing things it's always a good idea that you can turn off your lights and your shadows and as I'm around over here you're gonna see that I'm gonna position this light to kind of like be pointing towards his other cheek over here so I'm just gonna use my rotation to position that over there and keep an eye on my preview window here if I'm really having a hard time seeing things over here as well I can stop this and go back into my render settings and again just boost this up let's try see what happens 3 it was struggling a little bit but you know what I'm gonna keep it at 3 but I'm gonna turn off the indirect lighting down to zero zero zero zero and I'm just gonna keep the diffuse for now let's hopefully should be fine I'm gonna see if I can get a better render time over here I'm just going to reload this over here and it's not great but it's still doing quite a good job just like that again if I want to make it go even faster I can kind of like do a range of region over here by clicking on that little square up there again anytime I reload this image just kind of resize so I'm just gonna have to be playing around with my windows for a little bit so this light if I look at them from the top again it's pointing roughly in the right direction but I don't want it really to illuminate this character too much I'm gonna keep moving it like this like this like this almost as if the light was coming over here from a side of him to a degree and I'm gonna do is just rotate this round a little bit like that and again I will find the correct spot at some point in the future very very very very soon again just like the spotlight I should hang --gel this down just a little bit as well and just like inside of a photo studio like that I want to make sure that the lights have similar height as well so they're pointing like that there we go and again as I come over here I'm just gonna pause that for a sec give it a second to refresh there we go and I'm using the keyboard shortcut Apple and you will control you on your key if you're on a PC just to start creating some light on this side of the face over here like that okay so this is looking kind of good right now in terms of its position but what we want to do now is start adding a little bit of color to this light as well before I play around with the intensity again now you're gonna see that here there's no real cone shape the thing that defines what this light looks like is actually the size of the actual light itself so if you make the light larger it should be brighter if you make it smaller it should be dimmer in nature because it's got more or less surface to emanate light from and if I'm getting noise in shadows I can always increase my volume samples as well so what I'm looking for is the color temperature option inside the area light options like this and I'm going to go bring this down down down to kind of like maybe four thousand four hundred like that to get kind of like a nice orangey looking light like this again cuz I'm getting a little bit of noise I'm just gonna take my volume samples and I'm gonna put them up to four like that it won't really matter until the end of my actual scene like that and again if it's taking way way way way way too long for us to render it out boom boom boom I will just go ahead again and do a quick update there and see what this is looking like okay so now I've got of my character lit with this indirect fill light over here and I'll take my samples down a little bit to keep this kind of like running fairly quickly as we sees fit like that what I'm gonna do now is take my spotlight over here and I'm going to turn him back on so I'm just gonna leave this window down here for a second now I'm going to turn on the other spotlight like that again because I'm turning things on and off and the renderer I might have to do an update full scene of here and now we're gonna see the combination of both lights interacting together now before it looked like that this area over here was very very very very light and kind of like you know filled with orange light like this one over here and what I'm gonna do is just take the exposure of my fill light I'm just gonna bring it down down down down down a little bit like that and if I wanted to I could in Crete decrease this light just a little bit more to make it just a little bit more orange II in nature again so I'm just pushing that down a little bit like that and now I'm art directing both of the lights I still want these lights to look like shadows but I don't want them to be a hundred percent perfectly black pixels inside of here so again I could also take this spotlight here and either with color or with any other property that I wanted to I could just increase that value a little bit so the colors are a little bit more separate a bit more orange a bit more white in nature just like that and you're gonna see that we're starting to create some interesting contrast between them again you're gonna have to choose about your exposure settings as well and you're gonna see that this light again you want it to be nice bright and filling up most of the actual scene just like that and that's looking fairly good like that I've got some highlights over here I've got some shadows which are not too dark per se and I still have some areas which have a little bit of shadow like the ears and down here but all of this is starting to look fairly nice inside of my scene just like that what I'll do next is come over and actually choose a to add a little backlighting to this as well so for that what I'm gonna do is come in to create again go into lights and I'm going to create myself another spotlight now because of his ginormous ears we might have to actually use multiple back lights per se just because sometimes depending on the silhouette of your character it's gonna be easier to do one way or another so I'm gonna move this light back a little bit over here I'm gonna press T on my keyboard to bring up the target and it's always good to place the target in the area where you want the lighting to actually be another thing that I've got in my scene is that I've actually made my camera nice and large and visible inside of here by selecting it and actually going down into it here we go object display and making the locator scale much much much bigger so that we can actually see it and use it as a guide for placing our lights but what I'm gonna do is very quickly move this round back here like so whoops actually a little bit more controlled than that by using just the arrows like that from my transform gizmo and I'm again gonna looking at this from the top it's a good idea to kind of like position your backlight almost almost looking at the camera except I'm just gonna position it a little bit higher to start off with now I use the Arnold render view to actually start placing that again I'm gonna see if my viewpoint 2.0 can actually give me a little bit of a prediction of where things are gonna be and you're gonna notice that as I raise up the spotlight like this you're gonna see that it's gonna start creating highlights on the top of his head over here and the top of this ear over here just like so and that's why backlighting is also called rim lighting in some occasions as well be careful not to put your lights kind of like through walls and stuff like that it can create some interesting errors that will happen because it won't allow it to actually showing through the wall but if I do a quick Arnold render view over here again my intensity is probably way too low and the exposure of the spotlight and again one of the things that I'm gonna do is just come into my outliner and make sure that everything is named appropriately so I'm gonna make sure that I go into Windows outliner there we go and my area light is actually my fill light which I forgot to rename earlier and my spotlight is going to be my back light underscore a1 because I'm gonna make it maybe a few multiples of this one over here so I'm gonna take the outliner and I'm gonna hide it wait I'm gonna wait for this to kind of like take a little pause over here and now what I'm gonna start doing is playing around with the exposure of my backlight I'm gonna start bringing this up up up up up up up make sure that my interactive viewport is turned on let's see how much exposure I need to add whoa 20 way way way too much it's always good to go over the top and then bring it back down little by little and I can see lots of little light particles over here I think that my camera my light is too behind my camera over here you can see as I drag it up in my perspective view over here you're gonna see that I can actually start seeing the rim lighting coming in there so again how much not too much it's just about making enough lighting so I'm gonna change where the target is and we're gonna put it roughly where his ear is over here just to see if I with one light I can actually get lighting coming down here over his ear just like that again double-checking that this is roughly in the right place use the transform gizmos axes one at a time if you need more precision but again the backlight should be fairly high up like that it should give me a little bit of light on the shoulders like this and there we go I'm positioning it just a little bit further back like that there we go and now what I'm going to do again is just do a quick refresh just to see what it looks like I'm gonna hit refresh there we go there we go there we go lots of little light particles being scattered all over the place and the backlight can actually be quite intense more intense than the key light if necessary but again always take these things with a pinch of salt even a little bit of rim lighting like this is gonna create a great effect for this over here and to make it a little bit different as well I'm gonna add in a little bit of color temperature I'm gonna boost that up to like 8,000 per se and that's gonna start creating a little bit of lighting like that which is really really really cool so as I mentioned before all of this setup is always about trying to make our lights actually illuminate specific areas the rim at the top of the head over here and also I can create kind of like lights which kind of like filling in shadows and lights which are providing the main area of lighting here now if I have problems with anything that I don't specifically like say for example over here I'm really not too keen on having his shoulder over here having kind of like all of this blue color I'm okay with it being here on screen right but I don't like it here on screen left what I'm gonna do is use a feature inside of Arnold which is called barn doors which if I come down here to the light filters section over here and hit add I'm gonna have an option over here to add something which is called a barn door now barn doors you find on regular studio type of lights they're these little flaps that cover the light slightly and what that's gonna do is that it's going to allow us if I just hide my render view to an extent to control what the shape of this light actually is so if I double-click on AI barn door it's gonna take me into the controls for this specific effect and what I'm gonna do is look at my light and I'm gonna choose where I want my barn door to be and I'm gonna say that that's roughly the right hand side of my door but you're gonna see that depending on my positioning that will change one way or another I don't think I'll be able to see this feature inside of the Maya viewport yeah I'm gonna have to go in and actually render out a scene from my interactive renderer so I'm gonna come into Arnold render view and to make sure that I can see the barn door which I actually have just seemed to have placed in the right place just so that you can see I'm just gonna switch very quickly to the perspective shape I'm gonna read and reload this so that you guys can see it over here from the top now if I play around with the barn doors like this you're gonna see that there's this little area that I can drag from the right of my light which is going to trim again I'm gonna zoom into here for effect so you can actually see that what I'm doing is that I'm adding like a little cover which is covering up one side of the image like this there's an overall effect that we can play around with as well and we can also blur those edges a little bit if necessary but importantly if I came over here and just move this around and again did a quick refresh here too there we go there we go I've gone a little bit too far again my computer is now going along trying to make sure that it can do all of the screen capturing and rendering hopefully you're getting a much better view than I am actually on the screen over here but what that should mean is that when we go back into our standard camera view over here and again I'm gonna go into my shot my shape camera number two over here and refresh my shot zoom out zoom out so now there we go you can see that I'm starting to trim this effect over here just a little bit and if I start dragging this down a little bit hopefully when i refresh this again that highlight over there has gone so I've still got the light actually appearing over here but have used the barn doors to actually trim the edge of that light really really really easily that's a great feature inside of Arnold now before I continue I want to add a little bit more of a rim to this side of the head as well so I'm actually going to duplicate my backlight I'm going to pause this for a second to make sure that my Vince is still gonna go well and what I can do is that I can select my light over here now by going to edit duplicate I can duplicate a light inside of my Maya scene just like this and you'll see that I've already got all of the settings set up for this new light notice that the barn doors do not actually copy over those are specific to the name of the actual light itself and you'll see that Maya has named this light backlight number two so I'm gonna come over here and I'm gonna move this light and again I'm just gonna position the target in the area that I want to illuminate so I'm gonna move it again into the area where the ear is roughly around here again a lot of this stuff is very easy just move the object to where you want it to illuminate grab the light move it around and again get it to a point where you're going to be illuminating the thing that you want to illuminate without casting too many shadows on the floor like that so again I'm keeping an eye out on my spotlight over here which hopefully should disappear as soon as I get this in the right place and again I'm using my viewpoint 2.0 to roughly direct where this backlight over here is and I might have to play around with some barn doors and a few other things to make sure that it doesn't spill and into this region over here as well again I could also take the target and move it up until the cone itself is above his head like that you're gonna see that that's gonna do the same thing again that if the lights pointing down it's going to add a little bit of light back here and if I move it up like that it will add a little bit of light back here around his neck but hopefully not touching that shoulder so again I'm going to come into here into the Arnold render view see if I can see the effect of the light it's very very very subtle right now but it is there and if I want to make this more extreme I can play around with these settings of my light a bit just double check that this is playing back see a little bit of a glow there a little bit of a glow there I think that is working fine okay so we've done a little test render and things are looking really nice we've got some nice highlights on the shoulders a little bit round the back at the head over here and a nice little blue color kind of coming off over here on the side just like that to keep kind of like improving this but we might want to do is just change a little bit of some lighting in the background to add a little bit of color in terms of the background over here so I've already got a texture back there in the background but another thing we can do as well is just add a little bit of visual variety to this as well just by using a specific technique that you use in the lighting world a lot which is actually to use something that's called a gobo just to add a little bit of texture to the background over here so what I'm gonna do is i'm going to again create another very simple type of spotlight and again i'm gonna come into here just to show you guys how versatile these lights are i'm gonna create a point light in just a few seconds to add a little bit of ambient lighting in here as well but first of all let's go ahead and add a spotlight over here and again that's gonna create a spot light on the ground like such I still have my target mode turned off on like this but it's gonna be a little bit less mission-critical for me to get that onto my character because what I want to do is actually illuminate the background just a little bit so that it appears on my screen like so one of the things that Arnold whites allow you do as well is that I can come over here and I'm going to add this time not only a barn door but add something that's called a gobo and a gobo is actually in the real world a little piece of metal that a pattern cut out into it and the light can only illuminate through that pattern in the wonderful world of Arnold that gobo is actually tied to this slide map feature in here if I double-click on the AI gobo section and I can add a texture to it so if I come over here I choose file and I navigate into my hard drive there I've got my little gobo type of thing over here I've made something that looks like kind of like a series of white rectangles like that which is light that could be coming through kind of like a gridded window or something like that I'm going to press ok like that I'm going to change my perspective view just to my perspective shape so that we can see what that light looks like and in true fashion another thing that I'm going to do just before I turn the Arnold renderer on is I am going to turn off the back lights over here just by turning off illuminates by default oh my god all my lighting has gone crazy inside of my viewport over here because I'm probably hitting the limit of walk viewpoint 2.0 his hand is happy handling right now so anytime your lights go crazy inside of your viewport do not panic because it's very easy for us to turn everything back on and off again so this spotlight over here which I can rename over here I'm going to call this gobo which I can also do inside of the attribute editor over here fingers crossed if I've got my perspective shape turned on and I just refresh my renderer over here and do I have my run APR turned on yes and let's just have a look at why this is not updating camera shape very good perspective shape please camera shape to prospective and is it just because I've got my intensity turned down for this cuz I haven't turned it up yet just come over here give a shape it's gonna Arnold section and let's give it an exposure of 20 to give it kind of like something big and beefy to actually work with nope I'm not seeing the correct shape over here let's come into my shot cam here now you can start seeing the effects of the light over here it's way way way way way too bright but I think my little system is really struggling over here and you can just about see what this light is actually doing I'm gonna grab again my little gobo I'm going to use the standard rotate tool here we're gonna start moving it around my scene like this and this if it was illuminating for my character it would actually cast shadows on the character as well I'm gonna come over here and you're gonna see that what it's gonna do is that if I just position this behind my character like that and I rotate this round like so mm-hmm there we go really struggling now you know position that there I'm gonna just do an update full scene and there we go my gobo now falls into the right place like that now yet we can aren't direct this very specifically in terms of we can rotate things around we can position them various odd angles if we wanted to as well but these are just ways that you can kind of like add a little bit of visual variety to the background of your renders just like this and again because all of this is based on having different kind of like aspects over here you can actually play around with the properties of the gobo as well so if I come into AI gobo over here you'll see that I'll be able to play around with the different density and I will actually be able to make that gobo slightly stronger slightly dimmer in terms of where my light is I can also change its scale as well in terms of how the tight texture actually tiles as well and if I wanted to change its mending its blending mode or anything else like that I could do that as well so again not the best combination in the world right now oh if I will find an interesting place to position those lines like that and again another thing that you can do as well is not inside the gobo options but inside the light options themselves so if I click on the spotlight in my viewport again she's gonna make that a little bit bigger so that you guys can see it inside of the screen I'm gonna come over here and I'm gonna look for that cone angle over there it's gonna allow me to spread that gobo out just a little bit more so I'm gonna come over here there we go play around with the cone angle there we go and because I've got a curved background like that that's gonna create an interesting type of effect there and the only thing that I need to do is just move this light hopefully a little bit further towards here there we go well done okay I'm gonna come over here add a full scene again there we go and now I've got myself just a little pattern added down here round the back of my lights just like that I will have to play around a little bit with the exposure the that cuz again my light is based on what is actually being illuminated as well and it could also cast its own color as well but I'm not gonna touch that just for now so again I've just placed in a little bit of visual variety in the background with just using a light and now what I want to do is turn all of my lights on and add just a little bit of ambient lighting as well to my scene so Arnold has a fantastic tool for managing most of your lights but what I'm gonna do is make sure that first of all I have all of these back lights and my front spotlight over here my key light also turned on over here and you'll notice that I've been renaming things constantly as we've gone along and that's really useful for us because inside Arnold does this new tool over here which is called a light editor over here which is really handy because it shows me most of the properties that are important for me to set up my light inside of Arnold primarily the light itself if it has a color filter tied to it and also what's his exposure settings and how many samples and shadow rays are being cast by it so all of these settings over here will allow me to actually start now editing what my final light setup actually looks like if I come over here and I turn my renderer back on again and I update my full scene now that everything has been lit up over here I have kind of like all of these properties over here and if I want to kind of like start making small little changes like for example I might take the exposure of my gobo and I might turn that to seven and see what that looks like and I can see that the decay is just too much turn that to 12 and that's gonna be a lot less in your face and it's just gonna be a very very very subtle light in the background the same way that with my back lights if I wanted to what happens if I turn these up to 15 I start getting a little bit of interference over here as well and you'll see that again I can just change those settings really really really quickly and I can just change things what happens if I want my fill lights actually be a little bit more red in nature I can double click over here I can add a little bit of a red tint to it and hopefully as my scene refreshes it should start overlaying that new color and again if it isn't working hit update full scene over there and I can't see that being turned on it's probably because my fill light over here if I double-click it here I actually get the properties over here it's probably because the use color temperature is overriding it if I turn use color temperature off you can see that I can just leave the color like that I can now have the red color that I wanted over here so again it's one of those things of again I could just direct that so it's a little bit different to what we had before and you're gonna see that Arnold's gonna keep updating its view over here so if you wanted for whatever reason a weird magenta light on the side of your character like this but you can do it as well and again just make sure that that's not too dark because again the week really really really weird combination there I'm just gonna turn that back to an orange e-type color cuz I'm a bit more happy with that person so just like that a little bit redder I could be noodling around with these settings all day until I get kind of like the perfect perfect perfect color that I'd want but there we go we can start actually seeing my scene over here now one of the things that we can do as well to see a little bit of the color in the background right now is actually increase the ambient lighting inside of the in the world as well this would be a setting that I would say would be optional in most cases and some people might frown about it as well but I really don't like it when everything inside of my scene is very very very dark I just want to add a little bit of light here and to do that what I'm gonna do is just close down these windows temporarily and I'll bring them back up and I'm gonna use the last light that we're gonna use inside of this setup so I'm gonna come over here and I'm gonna create a standard Maya point light so I'm gonna come over here and I'm just going to move this little point light up above the head of our little goblin over here and this light over here will emanate light in all different directions very much like a match or a candle flame it emits light in every single direction which is gonna be great for a fill but specifically inside of Arnold what I'm gonna do is that I'm gonna take this ambient light I am gonna use some color temperature on it and what I'm going to do is turn its decay type from quadratic to constant now I'm gonna do that with the Arnold render view turned on so that you guys can see what happens that by default it doesn't look like the light is doing anything at all but as soon as I turn this to a constant over here and I turn this exposure up to let's say a value of 1 what should happen is if I update my render view like that you're now gonna see that this light is now gonna start illuminating the entire scene like this and again this is because now this light has no decay whatsoever if I wanted to another thing that we could do is just add you know just a little smidge of light over here so I could put that down to 0.5 per se just like that and again just press play to update my scene file it's basically to get just a little bit of color here and there now if I'm not happy with the shadows over here because I think they're kind of like in the way I can tweak around a little bit where my key light is positioned and I can try and bring it 80 a little bit closer towards the goblin over here and hopefully that should lower that shadow over there as well or I could take the geometry and actually move it a little bit down as well so again if I came over here updated in my scene you can see that I've moved that shadow down a little bit like that and maybe it's just I need to move a little bit over here like such again not screwing up my lighting per se obsession should probably undo those cuz my target is not turned on so again I'm just gonna turn on my target before I do any major edits to my lighting and again I'm going to just date that full scene the guys at solid angle are saying that they are working on actually updating that so that you don't have to press that update scene as often it should kind of like start caching it a bit more automatically but we'll just have to wait and see when they have time to finish implementing that off but they've done a fantastic job at getting all of this stuff in Maya actually working it's really really really impressive what we were able to do now in Y in 2017 so there we go move the shadow a little bit got it into the right position haven't really messed up my lighting a little bit per se but now that I've added some ambient light I do see that this is a little bit overexposed so I might come in to again my Arnold's light no sorry one sec I'll just use the button over here much easier I'll just choose my light editor over here and what I'll do is that I'll come over and I will look for my key light and let's take this down to an intensity of let's say twelve here and let's take my fill light over here and let's drop that to an intensity of ten so look maybe a little bit more eleven there you go good good good good good and now I've almost got this ready for presentation as well as I said before if you're ever in doubt just cheat a little bit now let's take the background as a terrible solution but you can lower it a little bit just to put that shadow in a little area that I had here which if I move it closer you can see that that's where all the lights are mixing just moving it down a little bit just to move it out the way and that's gonna give me pretty much what I'm looking for now if this looks too dark for you guys one of the things I want to do last is that I want to look at the display settings inside of mine and this is what the raw image would look like we talked about this last week that actually Arnold is rendering out a raw image for us over here and if I want to come over here into the gamma settings and put in 2.2 and here this is what the render would look like with a corrected gamma curve over here so you'll notice that actually the shadows which are inside of here they're not as dark as you think they might be but most of times I would recommend you guys to kind of like keep this model over here of not having any gamma Corrections for when you're actually lighting things because the way that light behaves is just a little bit more predictable to an extent but I know that if you're not gonna do any color correction whatsoever you might want to turn this gamma 2.2 on right from the start of your image and do all of your adjustments based on that I mean even a little bit of ambient lighting inside of your scene you're gonna see is gonna cause a huge effect for how your objects might actually look like so again depending on what you're doing if we're thinking about working with gamma that would be it pretty much if we were still gonna be working kind of like you know really really really pushing the shadows having ambient lighting and other stuff like that we might want to add some fill light into other specific areas we sometimes call them kicks as well so if we wanted kind of like a Lights actually go across his eyes or something like that we could use barn doors and different things to add lights specifically in the areas that we actually need them but you're gonna see that this for doing presentations and actually emailing people about working progress and other things like that is really really really really useful for you guys to actually be able to show and present your work to other people last but not least even though it seemed like it was a lot of time to set up all of these lights per se one of the great things is that once you have a lighting setup made up like this one over here you can actually select objects inside of your scene like all of the lights and your background as well and you can go to file export selection and inside this export selection I could call this 3-point lighting with background background over here and that will save its own individual Maya file which when I export it will actually save a scene only with my Maya lights and my Maya background and what this is gonna do is it's going to save a version of my Maya scene just with my lights and my background so I can import any 3d model that I'm actually working with and I've already got everything set up and now I've just realized that I should have exported my shot cam in that list of things as well but you get the idea that you actually have a premade scene for presentations and you can just add any objects into that scene and there might be a little bit of tweaking that you need to do because the lighting is always different between scenes but you'll notice that you save a lot of time so we've gone ahead and finished off a render and actually just added a slightly different material for the eyes over here but you can see just as a quick way of seeing actually a little bit of the detail of this very very very simple kind of like 3d character it's all started kind of like coming nicely together because of the lighting if you want to save an image out from your Arnold render view ups here in file you've always got a option to save the color corrected image which would be the version that has the gamma curve applied to it or if you want to save this darker version because you want to color correct it in Photoshop or other stuff like that you can hit save image original and it will just ask you to save it somewhere on your hard drive and I came up already with one of these final rendered versions over here as well it's also a case that depending on how powerful your computer is it's a good time for you to go into your render settings and boost up the anti-aliasing for example and maybe some of the glossy reflections if your materials have any but as this is just kind of like a very basic clay render per se if I boosted these settings up to five and rendered them out again even directly from the Arnold render view as soon as it's ready for it to actually compute all of the data and save an actual image you'll just go ahead and save either an original or a color corrected image just like that and that will cover the material for today three-point lighting it's very important to choose a camera view and stick with it because if you're trying to render something from like the back or from um things you'll can't your lights setup would have to be slightly different to what we have now and also that it's very important to have the Arnold settings available to you guys so make sure that you're looking through the Arnold settings and having a look at what are the type of properties that you can be playing around with we've spoken very briefly about gobos and barn doors they're really really really useful for art directing the light which is inside of your scene and with that we've finished for today I'll be back next week with another tutorial let me know if the method we're using right now with these headphones is actually working if you think that sounds actually better I'm hoping that you won't be able to hear that fans but please let me know in the comments below and especially thanks very much for taking the time for actually learning you guys have learned so much over the last couple of weeks of actually doing all of the different tutorials they're hoping that you guys will be able to kind of like start making your own 3d work as well and if you want to kind of like post links to that or show me you know your portfolios or other stuff like that I'm more than happy to kind of like have a look to see what you guys are actually coming up with in your own time as well so with that we finished for today keep learning and keep strong and really go beyond everything that is done here in these tutorials as well there's a wealth of knowledge of Maya outside there as well keep looking at great material and I will see you all next week take care bye bye

Channel: yone santana

Views: 13,382

Keywords: Maya, 2017, Arnold, Santana, Yone, yonesantana, 3D, Tutorial, Lighting, 3 point, three point, intro, beginner, Autodesk, indirect illumination, spot light, raytrace, UK

Id: _N-vT0jEYLo

Length: 69min 29sec (4169 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 15 2016