Maya 2017 - Interior Lighting with Arnold

hello and welcome to another exciting tutorial inside of Maya 2017 today we're going to be talking about how to create interior lighting using Arnold and this tutorial today is kind of like going to cover a lot of how to think about lighting environments even with kind of like exterior sunlight pouring in through these windows a little bit of actual interior lighting as well and this is a slightly buffed up version of a tutorial I did last year for mentalray where we had a small little room and we were lighting it using some ambient occlusion and some very simple mental ray lighting as well and I'm going to be showing you guys how to take that even a step further and use all the power of Arnold to actually deliver some fantastic looking interior lighting first of all thanks very much for everyone for taking the time for following the channel as well we're almost up to 1500 subscribers which is absolutely amazing thank you very much you guys kind of like spending some time with me every week kind of like just doing a few odd things in Meijer to kind of like push up your beginner skills and I really appreciate the time and the effort that you guys put into these things just following me along week by week just to kind of like have a look at things and all of your questions and everything really do meet the world to me so thank you very much for that so first of all what we're going to do is we're gonna just see the scene that I've got over here which is kind of like the interior of a shoebox like this if I was making an environment I would probably leave the actual face over here kind of like still on but I've removed that wall just so that it's easier for me to move around with you guys and position the camera so you can see what I'm doing actually inside of the scene a little bit clearer so we've got kind of like some light that's going to be coming from the windows over here so we're going to have natural exterior lighting over here I also have myself a little desk lamp over here which is not official source of light over here and I'll be talking about how to create a light in here that will eliminate our scene which in Arnold in my 2017 is a complete and utter breeze and if you compare this to the tutorial from mentalray you're going to see that there's a lot less setup that we actually need to do to start create getting interior lighting now one of the things that's great about Arnold is that it creates fantastic indirect illumination over here it's very hard to light any type of interior scene with just using one light by itself and I just want to show that to you guys very briefly because if I was over here and I was thinking about making any type of simple light inside of my scene if I came over here into Arnold and I made myself a light and I look for a sky dome light very similar to what we were using when we were making our HDR s per se if I came over here and then I'll turn on just make a little bit more space here so I can see my scene and then what I'm going to do is turn on the Arnold interactive render view over here you're going to see that we are getting some indirect lighting coming into my scene over here fairly simply an Arnold will start kind of like pushing through over here and if I just zoom out a little bit just to frame that a little bit better you'll see that there is some light coming into our environment but I can guarantee you that most of this light is some of it's coming through the windows and another amount of it is actually spilling through the back end of the actual open box kind of like room that I've got over here now if I turn the intensity here let's say up to mm 4 to an extent or maybe just a little bit lower than that let's try 3 for a second over here all of this is going to be really really really really really noisy but you're going to see that this is what Arnold really excels at doing very quickly which is creating this indirect lighting which is what I spent about an entire you know our tutorial last year trying to set up inside of mentalray and Arnold gives us this pretty much by default with any type of light that we actually make now importantly what's going to happen is that this light which is in here is going to be very ambient and very diffused and I could smooth it out but you'll notice that the image has a load of noise inside of it so the because this is the only light inside I seen I could crank up the sound poles and the properties inside of this area like there's got to be really really really really really difficult for this photometric light to actually light up all of my scene beautifully and smoothly what's a little bit more efficient is for me to actually light the scene with various lights and I'm going to be using area lights to start off with we're going to be using some spotlights which we were looking at the settings for them from last week as well and I'll be showing you a few extra things and you'll see that maybe in combination with this light we're going to start getting some fairly nice results for how this looks so what I want to do first is I want to start working on the light that would come in through these windows over here what I'm going to do is take the intensity property of this area of this photometric area light and just turn that down to zero so it's going to be light as if it was off so if I press play here now everything's black and surprise surprise Arnold will be rendering that away very quickly because there's nothing that it needs to be rendering out from the contribution of this light what I'm going to do is create an Arnold area light so I'm going to go into Arnold menu up here and go into light and choose the Arnold area light don't confuse it with the Maya area light which you could use for this exercise as well but it will just have slightly different settings and it will have the exposure and everything just a little bit more available to me so what I'm going to do is just make this area light just a little bit bigger and what I'm going to do is come over here and frame it so that it is actually this roughly a little bit bigger than my window frame you can do this either by positioning the light fairly close to the window and just scaling it up or using one of the orthographic views as well so again if I do this like this just until it's a little bit bigger than the window itself and two things about positioning that I want you guys to notice is that this stick over here that kind of like raises from the actual rectangle of the area light that's the direction of the light so currently my light is pouring outside of my window so if I turn my interactive renderer on I probably wouldn't see anything so I'm going to hold down J on my keyboard to angle snap this and turn it round 180 degrees just like that and as I mentioned before all I want to do is position this light ever so slightly outside of my windows like that and I made my windows square like that so they're kind of like fit really really easily with for me to scale them just like that okay so now this area light is going to simulate the light that's pouring in through the window inside of here and what I'm going to do is just do a quick little test render over here because I can almost guarantee another thing that I should do as well is that I actually have another camera set up in this file which is called shot camp over here so I've already got a camera from which I'm going to render out from I did a little bit in the three-point lighting tutorial of how to set up cameras last week which you can check out as well on the channel and what I want to do is still be navigating around in my perspective view but I want my Arnold renderer to be rendering out my shot cam shape instead another quick setting that we need to do before we boost up our exposures so that we can actually see this over here is just to make sure that we're actually rendering out in the correct color space so if I come over here into Windows and I turn on display settings you're going to see that I'm going to have a gamma property over here which I'm going to change from one to a gamma of two point two this is important for me to set up over here because as I go lighting I'm lighting an image that I'm not going to color correct per se so as like boost up the exposure I might have to use some large values I'm going to try a value of 20 and hopefully that should blow everything out as soon as I turn my interactive renderer back on there we go really really really bright lighting at 20 but this slider will scale to match basically the number I've got and I'm kind of like seeing like an exposure of 17.5 is quite good for me maybe I'm going to do it just a little bit lower because again that is just one window by itself now hopefully you're going to notice that the light which is in here is going to be very different from how the outside photometric light was spilling into the environment the light was very diffused and quite natural as well there was a little bit of noise but we were actually not seeing any of these glow patterns over here which we would kind of like expect as kind of like light photons I actually just move in to our scene like that again the great thing about Arnold is that it gives me a lot of indirect illumination by default also look at the shadows on the desk over here automatically we get them those for free and you're going to see that they darken up around the edges now last year I was using an effect you called ambient occlusion which really helps us highlight this type of effect and the indirect lighting in Arnold is so good that it actually gives us a very nice soft effect however Arnold is also capable of rendering out ambient occlusion but it can do it as a separate render pass which I'll talk a little bit more about that in future but if I didn't have this gamma correction setup over here you'll notice that my little scene would look really really really dark now this might be great for me to color correct and send it into nuke or any other applications because there's a lot of lighting information inside of this raw image but as I'm going to be making just myself a little JPEG to use as a cover picture for the channel what I'm going to do is work with this gamma setting 22.2 over here and it can always save a raw image later on if I really need to but importantly it's important for us to think about what's the color space that I want to light in which in my case is the gamma of two point two so I'm going to turn off my display settings leave myself this little window over here and because this is exterior light I'm going to use the color temperature chart over here and I'm going to turn on my play button over here to bring up my IPR renderer one more time and what I'm going to do is again I could play around with the color temperature of this room but I'm going to put my color temperature up to let's say 7,500 so it's kind of like a strong bluish color kind of like we're going to have a nice blue sunny day outside if you can believe that that could happen with these amazingly dark windows over here and what I want to do now is at we create a few more lights but I want them to have all the same setting so one of the very easy things that we can do is just make a few duplicates of our light I'm going to go into edit and duplicate the light and if I turn on my interactive render over here or I press control D or command D on my scene you're going to see that the light when I duplicate it actually doubles the amount of light which is in my scene again because light is an additive process and you can see that as I move the copy of my light and my viewport is now going to start illuminating other areas of my scene again press control D or command D if you're on a Mac like myself and again we can see are giving us some wonderful near real-time feedback in this IP our renderer over here so all of a sudden this is reasonably close to where I actually go out my tutorial kind of like lighting wise quality in terms of mental ray but it's really taken me a very quick time to kind of like just add all of this indirect lighting over here inside of Arnold now you'll notice that when I'm doing any of these renders they're all really really really grainy and bitty and it's a good idea when you're lighting to be okay with lighting at this way over here don't fret too much about if there's noise in your images because we have to start later on adding more lights and really deciding what is causing our problems inside of this image and where do we need to add more samples now samples can be related to the overall quality of the image they can be related to the lights specifically in their shadows or they could be related to specific material settings so I'm just going to pause the interactive render over here and I'm going to bring up my render settings by either clicking this little gear box button over here or going into Windows rendering editors render settings over here and inside my render settings I have the Ahnold renderer tab over here and here is where the main quality properties are for my actual rendering now of course we've spoken before about the anti-aliasing main controller which is like the main control that improves the quality of my overall scene but also that there are other properties which are down here as well which are diffuse the glossy the reflection the subsurface capturing and the volume indirect now these numbers they're on by default and they work quite well but for example if we want to optimize the speed at which we're rendering there's a few settings that we can actually do to help this happen now you'll notice that if I turn the volume indirect light to zero honorable refresh and my image still looks pretty much the same and again my scene has no subsurface scattering and if I turn that down it's going to look like it's the same and if I then turn off the refraction turn off the glossy it seems like everything still has the same textural quality like that but what happens if I turn the diffuse down to zero well something kind of likes fairly weird all of a sudden because what's happening is that now I can see that my light is actually flowing into the actual room but there are no diffuse bounces what I mean by diffuse bounces well actually the light that's coming into here is hitting the floor it's hitting the ceiling and it's being illuminated but with tailing Arnold to not have any diffused bounces at all if I turn the diffused bounces up to one we're going to start seeing that indirect illumination coming back into my scene and that means the light comes in hits the floor bounces up in random directions and will hit a little bit on the actual scene like this now depending on how bright we want our scene to be we will want to have more indirect bounces going through the room for different properties and again I recommend you look at your Arnold help section for Maya on the Arnold website as well because they've got fantastic documentation explaining all of this as well but you'll notice that even if I'm boosting up these diffuse values over here it's not much that's actually happening I can actually turn fuse values down to one just so that I can see a very simple reflection over here and that means that I've got some lovely diffused bounces over here now what happens is that I might need to actually remove some of this grain later on and I might have to boost some of these values but it's important to note what we actually need to so I've taken a little quick test render over here of small region inside of the Arnold renderer and you'll notice that there's still a lot of noise in these areas as well now as we keep adding lights into our scene we're going to have to play around with the sample settings for each one of these lights and a great way of keeping track of what your lights are actually doing is to be using the light editor that we were using last week as well because we can see some of the general properties which are inside of here now I could be playing around with these settings quite a lot but I even needed to do a small render region over here which took a few minutes when I boost it up these samples over here so importantly I can select my lights and kind of like call this window one window too and again keeping things nice and named as well window oh three that was really good I would probably put them in a line as well but I can also play around with the sample settings inside here very quickly now by default I want to keep these samples initially very very very very low and I also want to keep all three lights to actually have the same settings as well I can actually just turn on some of the lights at some periods of time say for example I can come into my window one add some color to it change the intensity oh that the SkyDome light as you can see over here is currently set to an intensity of zero but I could remove it from the actual render of the scene as well if I so choose to and again if I wanted to look at one specific light of what it's actually doing by itself I just zoom out here and I just pan my view a little bit just to fill that in a little bit more I'll turn off my render region section over here and say for example if I just wanted to look at the effect of the light of say window number one I can also choose isolate over here and hopefully let me just click for a second over here there we go sometimes you just need to do a quick refresh over here so open this up again I'm just going to turn on isolate over here which will turn everything else off and if I just press play over here it's a great way of isolating what one light is doing by itself because it's much much much much much easier later on for us to play around with how many samples I need to be using to smoothen this light out and then how to start using my render settings over here which I will turn down to 3 ok just to keep things quickly and later on I could add more diffused samples and if I wanted to I could add more samples to this light as well until I see how smooth my render actually needs to be and then I'll do some master changes at the end over here with the camera anti-aliasing maybe give it up to the value of 6 or 7 and then let it render over time as well but initially we want to keep our interactive view very very very responsive and very very very quick so to keep that happening we're going to keep the low samples and we know that we can clean the noise up later on the last thing that we can do that can help improve the speed of our computer of our real-time playback is to actually have a look at what's the bucket size that we're actually using which basically you'll have to look up a little bit online because it very much depends on how many threads your computer can actually use now my laptops are not particularly powerful but if I turn the bucket size down inside of the systems tab in Arnold what's going to happen is that it will change the size of those little squares that come across our screen like that and you're going to see that this will take a little bit longer to kind of like work its way around the screen but my computer is now capable of using all of its processes to be able to actually render out the scene of the image and you saw that that took less than half the time than we were waiting for right now to render out the entire frame like that so again check out the Arnold documentation as well every computer is different this isn't a magic number per se 32s working fine for me as well but it will be specific to your computer as well smaller values are just dependent on how powerful the processor of your computer actually is so over here what I'm going to end up doing is just turn off my isolate again bring in all of my lights like this and I'm going to start considering how I can start creating a background plane over here for actually having kind of like some form of illumination or background outside of my window now we have used HDR s in the past HDR s can be used perfectly for you know creating a texture on top of the environment sphere or if we wanted to we could just add like a little fake background outside of our image so if I came over here and I created a plane very simple polygon plane like this I'm just going to make it bigger by using the scale tool like that until it's roughly the width of the room like that I'm then going to press J on my keyboard and rotate around like that so it snaps to 90 degrees perfect and then I'm going to move it outside very much the same way as in a movie set you can have these fake backgrounds to an extent because anything that's a plane like this could be just a very simple texture over here but one of the things that's important about this let me just go into my channel box and I'm going to turn down its subdivisions to one won't really affect anything but kind of like keeping everything in this low polygon count as possible this plane over here if I render it out by default it's going to have a Lambert shader and as you can see it doesn't really look too sexy inside at the render because currently the default texture that it has is being affected by light so what's going to happen is I'm just going to switch over here to my scale tool make that a little bit bigger so that it fills in all the space of the windows just like that again that will be dependent on your camera view what I want to do is make myself a specific material that will not be affected by light so what I'm going to do is open up my hyper shade over here by pressing the hypershade button or going into the windows rendering editor hypershade and I'm going to look to create a new material which I'm going to type in the library and I'm going to type in AI for the Arnold library and press you to look for this material which is an Arnold utility material now this material over here it's very very very very simple but it replaces to an extent the Arnold surface sorry the Maya surface shader which is basically a material that is not affected by light so if I came over here and in its drop-down menus for the type of material is actually going to behave if I come over here into shade mode sorry not type and I look for flat over here this flat texture over here is going to be like what we used to use when we had an Maya surface shader over here so again I'm going to drag the Ahnold utility node onto here you'll add the texture to the actual plane and when I turn on my interactive render view what's going to happen is that this material is not affected by the light inside of my scene currently what's happening is that it's projecting white pixels because it's picking up this color that I have in here and it's using that color without a huge contribution of the Arnold lights so you see that I could change the color of these lights to red and what will happen is that light the pixels for this image will be red like this but notice that it's spilling just a little bit of color here but you'll notice that the white lighting over here is exactly the same so I'm going to leave it to white if I wanted to I could give it just like the slightest shade of blue to an extent over there to again give me that sense that this is natural sunlight which is over here this a texture although it's a flat color notice that in the color slot it does have the capacity of adding a texture to it so if I wanted to add an HDR image as a background or if I wanted to use an image that was something that I'd taken with digital camera or something for a skyline or something like that you can add a texture in here and this will just project that flat texture into the environment I'm going to stick with a very simple lighting example over here but one of the things I do want to do specifically with this object over here is in the attribute editor per se what I do want to do is inside here inside of the render stats tab so I've gone in selected the plane going into the attribute editor press ctrl a if you need to and go into the render stats tab inside here I do not want this material to cast shadows or to receive shadows either and that's going to be useful because I still have my environment sphere hidden around outside here inside of my scene and that light if I want to use it later on if I had some indirect lighting that was coming in through behind this plane over here it's actually going to cast a shadow into my room so these render stats are going to stop that from happening so let's start making some sunlight to come in through our windows so I'm going to create a standard directional light from my by going into the create lights menu and look for a directional light over here and this light again if I scale it up over here we've encountered it a few times now it's currently casting a light through my actual room over here as you can see but this light doesn't matter where it's placed in your scene we're only interested in its rotation so we're only going to use the rotate panel over here you can see that in the interactive render view it is just as I've rotated over here it's giving me some very interesting lighting to start appearing inside of my scene so again this light is now going through that background plane which we just made and it's creating parallel shadows and illumination based on it trying to replicate how the Sun works now again over here we're going to have a whole series of settings from Arnold which will allow us to control the light just a little bit better again one of the things I'm going to do is I am going to turn on the color temperature which will override the standard light color as well and then I'm going to give it a value of 550 which is white light ish to an extent let me just double-check that to understand I think 550 is absolutely fine there we go so 550 5500 there we go and what I'm going to do is just boost up the exposure of this light just a little bit so that we can really start seeing the contribution of the light inside of the room there's many different ways of actually doing this we could do it with a spotlight as well but you'll notice that the shadows that you get are going to be a slightly slightly slightly different over here so I'm going to still keep using this now what I really want to do is position my light in an interesting way where what I want to do is kind of like come over here and find an interesting angle for my lights over here I could have my lighting kind of like coming up over here and maybe having light hit a little bit of that back wall might be a good idea or maybe I might want to come over here and kind of like move it diagonally like that again it's just choosing a direction for the light in the room th you go again low lights are always much more dramatic you could say that highlights again it's kind of like we can choose in the interactive render view where this is going to go and I think I kind of like the idea of my light actually going a little bit up the wall let me see what I can do as I kind of like do this and this is why I love this kind of light render view inside of Arnold it's so easy to kind of like just place where the light is going and we can make kind of like these millimetric adjustments like that where I've got just a little bit of light that's hitting that table over there to brighten up this corner and I've got the lighting over here on the ground and the lighting over here as well again notice that my computer is furiously trying to catch up and try and render things so again give it a little bit of time as well even on the low settings over here my laptops traveling along but this is looking really really really nice the placement of the light is so important when you're lighting things it's all about giving a little bit of direction and kind of like highlighting things inside of the actual scene and you can see can do a lot of stuff now these lights over here they're currently kind of like very hard and they have like these crystal sharp type of you know highlights over here and if we want to soften this up by using the directional light we use a property such as the angle over here and the angle property if I bring it up to a value like of four over here it's now going to start diffusing the edges of those shadows over there I'll give my renderer a little bit of time to catch up but now we've stopped getting those hard shadows and it's made some nice soft shadows so you notice that I've managed to blur out what this area is actually going to look like if I want to really art direct this I can do a little you know render region over here and maybe instead of an angle of four let's see what happens if I take it down to two point four or let's see a value two there you go you see I'm only working in that area just to kind of like get it as kind of like nice as I possibly can because I know that once I turn my render region off it that same effect is going to kind of like be propagated across the other areas where the light is and again that's really helping me highlight that edge over there okay so I'm pretty much pretty happy with that so far okay so the light inside of here again will have to be softened out later on it does have some shadow density but if I really notice that the performance of my render view is going down we need to optimize things and one of the big things that we can help to optimize is this property over here which is called effect bowler metrics now if I turn these properties off over here you're going to see that there's no big dramatic change inside of my scene over here other than if I pretty much turn these values off my scene should start to render out a little bit quicker in my IPR so I can do this pretty much with all of the lights which are in my scene so if I come back to my windows 3 light over here you'll see that there's a property over here which is effective love metrics and cast shadows and you'll see over here windows 2 I am also going to come in here and turn off cast shadows where are we there we go effect follow metrics fix shadows and again this one will probably have them turned on as well by default I could also take my sky dome light and also make sure that that is turned off as well and now if I play this back there going to be a little bit of an increase in performance there as well because again I'm asking Arnold now not to consider volumetric effects as being rendered for these lights so it will just skip those calculations and give me a little bit of performance now somebody did ask me recently about how can we create follow metric type of effects inside of Arnold I'm going to show you this we can't do it for a light and we'll be looking at environment fog and other things a little bit in future as well but as you can see over here even though my image is fairly grainy it's still casting out fairly quickly and what I want to do is add another light to help compliment the light that's coming in through the windows and that light we're going to add basically some volumetric lighting coming in from the side so to do that we need to use two things number one is that we need to use a spotlight with a filter and the other thing that we want to do is to create a little bit of atmosphere atmospheric density inside of this image which we can use do through the Arnold environment tab so to do that I'm first of all going to create a standard Maya spotlight I'm going to come into here and I'm going to look for spotlight over here and inside of my scene I'm going to call rename a few things as well just so that I don't forget this is my sunlight and this thing over here is going to be my volume light okay so there we go now this little guy over here I'm just going to scale him up so we can see him a little bit clearer over there there we go there's the cone of my light and I might see some effect if I do that I'm going to press T on my tiara keyboard to bring up the target mode for this light and I'm going to position my light outside of my room so I'm going to navigate round just like this do do turn off my interactive renderer for just one second just so that my system can actually perform just a little bit better there we go just pause it there and what I'm going to do is position this light somewhere where I want the target to actually hit and then all I want to do is just position this light outside like this move it off to a corner like so and if I turn on my viewport lights will I actually see the effect of light yeah there we go you can see that I can actually just get a little bit of the light Direction kind of like figured out over here because again my Meyers viewpoint 2.0 is just ignoring pretty much where the the geometry it's just giving me kind of like the spotlight over here if I wanted to be very tricky with it I could turn on the shadows over here and you'll see that I can also position my light just so that it kind of matches a little bit where the directional light was actually coming from but again I'm just going to do a little bit of this here I'm kind of like making it so that it tries to fit in the top like that I'll get it there in a sec there we go okay so I've got a little bit of volume light coming in from the side of the image just like that and if I think I move the target a little bit there we go so I've got my light roughly in the position that I want I might we'll probably have to tweak it when I turn on the interactive renderer and let's just have a look at how that looks for now I'll go into the attribute editor and again I'm going to have to mess around with the Arnold properties of this spotlight and I'm also going to turn on some color temperature let's see what happens with the color temperature around 4000 so I've got some orangey yellowish type of light or I might actually do that in a sec with the actual color of the light instead depending on the results that I get with the fog and I want to kind of like play around with the exposure and again I'm going to give it an exposure value of 20 which will probably be pretty high like that there we go and I can actually see that the light is kind of like going in through the window over here and I just move ever so slightly over here and I can also change my lens radius just a little bit like that hopefully see if the light is a little bit bigger am I going to get some softer shadows over here and this light I am going to leave the volumetrics turned on like this now currently I can see the light color but I can't see the beams of the light actually coming in through the window and to make that happen just going to pause the interactive render room I'm going to open my render settings over here and inside the Arnold renderer tab there is a property called environment now here additionally we've also added the background HDR inside of this slot over here but there's also a tab here called atmosphere which will kind of like create little particles of dust inside of the actual image per se and the light should start picking those lights up now the atmosphere over here if I click on it you're going to see that there's a few problems over here the AI fog and also the AI volume scattering now this particular effect I'm trying to make is inside the AI volume scattering property over here and as I turn this on over here you're going to see that if I turn the interactive renderer it doesn't look like anything has happened however if I take this density property and I bring it up just a tiny amount you're going to see oh my god there comes the light ok so again very tiny amount that's 0.4 and you see a 14 and you see that I've already got this huge over blown out image over here I'm just going to turn this down to 0.5 roughly and if you are having trouble with the color of this you can also play around with the color of the volume lights as well so I can actually introduce colors over here and you'll see that as I add darker colors the effect of the fog is going to be less as it mixes up if I turn it into a black color the volume light pretty much disappears completely so to pick up those little particles of light like this over here I have to start lighting up my scene just like that there we go okay so I think I'll just add a little bit of that and again it allows you to do all sorts of crazy combinations as well done be careful with these other properties as well the attenuation should also help us control this setting over here but you're going to notice that as I do this over here it's going to kind of like allow a little bit of fall-off to actually happen like that so you're going to see that the particles are a bit more visible when they're close to the light and as they fall away from the light they're going to be less and less and that's visible again these settings add a little bit of realism to our scene but we have to control them so that again they're very very very very subtle again I'm just going to give my attenuation maybe a value of 0.5 there sorry 0.05 over there and you'll see that I've got this kind of like stream of light coming over here now that looks kind of like quite interesting in terms of you know volume lighting per se but I might want to make this look just a little bit nicer as well so if I really want to push to actually see these beams there's a little adjustment that I need to do on the light itself I'm going to come over here and I'm going to move my lights up again to help art direct what's going on over here if I need to I can also make my cone science just a little bit bigger so that more lighting is basically hitting those other windows as well there you go pretty good and if I want to I can also take this penumbra angle but I don't think it's going to cause too much of a problem because that will only be to the edges of this what happens if I add a little bit of drop-off to it there we go a little bit more natural there we go so before a lot of this is just going through the settings and making sure we're playing around with the right stuff so give me a radius of 5 I'm sorry to see those shadows start diffuse a little bit like that but if I want to see kind of like the nice volume like God rays coming through the window I'm going to have to increase my sampling a little bit there we go and I might just add a little texture to my light as well by going into the light filters over here and I'm going to look for a gobo now when I turn the gobo on over here this should allow me to choose a image or a texture per se so instead of kind of like going online and looking for an image all I want is a very simple noise type of filter so I think I'll just choose a fractal and again I'll choose fractal solid fractal let's choose fractal over here and you see that what we've got is kind of like this little swirly type of texture over here which if I just come over here mess around with some of the settings just to bring up a little bit of the frequency and you know want it nice and contrasted with an amplitude there we go and now if I look at this will this gobo start reflecting a little bit more of those textures over there so currently it's a little bit difficult to see but you're going to see that a few little adjustments can make a big difference now these settings might be slightly different on your computer but one of the things I want to do is actually boost up the intensity a little bit so that the volume light is a little bit clearer so I'm just going to boost that up maybe to about 23 it's okay to go over and we can actually start seeing some of the light actually having almost like a streak like effect as well also the colors really important as well if I start dragging down this color and making it a little bit more golden more warmer that color is going to allow me to see a little bit more of the Rays as well and if I just do like a little render reagent section inside of here just like that and basically render just that section out so it renders a little bit faster you're going to start seeing that we can start seeing these streaks of light might be a bit difficult to see with the Camtasia recording but we're starting to get this godrays type of effect over here and also we're getting a little bit of that gobos pattern appearing in the highlights over here as well so importantly for us we want to make sure that we are still kind of like working with this but if we want this kind of like volume light effect Gobbo plus the actual environment as well will help us do that as well so inside my render settings as well if I come into the environment environment over here and I right click on the word atmosphere over here and go to AI volume scattering message it'll bring up the settings for my AI volume scattering over here and with the interactive render again if I boost up the density as well it'll start getting a lot darker as you can see is that kind of light mist starts getting thicker and thicker and thicker but you can play around sorry about em you can play around with some of these settings as well and get to kind of like quite a good result over here as well and notice as well that this volume light effect has a lot of samples already on it now the reason why this is working is because the only light that's inside of my scene that's casting volume lighting currently is that spot light so it's still allowing me to keep my render time to be reasonably good as well but now this light is just way way way way way too intense so I'm going to click on my volume light again and what I'm going to do is just drag down its settings you're always going to see that we're going to be bouncing between the actual settings as well so I can see that that effect is clear over there I'm going to take my cone angle and maybe make it a little bit larger like so I just want to have kind of like this nice difference so it looks like the Sun is kind of like setting and it's a little bit over here to the left-hand side over there but I'm always having trouble with the color over here of the color temperature I think it's a little bit limiting sometimes so I'm just going to give it the color that I wanted to have almost as if I was adding a filter to it like that so I'm going to go for this yellowish white type color which is probably going to be much more to at least my liking as well but that's art direction for you there there we go we've got this beautiful stream of light coming in deep here now one of the great things that Arnold does as well is it allows us to take objects and turn them into light and this is going to be really useful for or the interior little lamp that I've got over here which if I just focus in on it over here because my light has a light bulb inside here now last year I actually did my little tutorial and that tutorial very much was about taking this mesh actually putting a spotlight into it to create the cone of light that would come out of it over here and we were just making sure that the light bulb inside did not cast or receive shadows and we were just using a standard mild light to create the cone of light very similar to what we were doing with this window over here now you can do exactly the same thing with Arnold as well because on will allow you to make this kind of volumetric lighting as well however to introduce you guys to a new tool one of the things that you can do is you can select any object inside of Maya any mesh which is here and I can come into Arnold lights and choose what we can call a mesh light now this mesh light over here currently looks like it hasn't done much to an extent but this mesh per se this bolt over this bulb object over here inside of the Arnold tab now again remember this is a piece of geometry exactly the same way that this lamp is a piece of geometry you're going to see that it's changing the type of Arnold object it is to what it calls a mesh light and if I do a very quick render view over here of the oops perspective camera over here and press to update my IPR you can see that I have over here again a little bit of render that's just coming up and currently I can't see this object over here but if I start boosting up its exposure value over here you should start seeing that now this mesh is starting to emit light again let's do one of my old kind of light let's blow it all out like that give it a very high intensity and then let's bring it down down down down down like this so you can see that now it looks like there is a light over here as well now if I actually want to see the bowl itself in Arnold one of the things I'll just do is turn on the 3d manipulation tool just so that I can actually navigate in the side of the render view it's really cool just by using the alt + left and middle mouse buttons there we go I'm just going to do a quick render region as well just cuz I want to see only this area over here and if I want to see the light very simple little light bulb option over here I've turn on you know the visible light which is over here and it will show me the mesh with a little bit of a glow around it just like that and you'll see that as the renderer fixes itself up what's going to happen is that that light again that object is going to emit light as well and little by little is being covered over by light particles so what we really want to do is kind of like do the same thing that we would do with any light give it a specific color make sure it's not too saturated maybe a orangey type of tungsten bulb might be just fine if I want to see the color of it there we go beautiful lighting over there and again just double check rest of the settings over here and again I'm going to leave this one to also be affected by the volume fog as well so this also will actually have its light affecting the volumetrics which are inside of the scene now currently we can't really see a lot from this point of view over here but if I started boosting the amount of how intense the exposures are on this light I'm going to start seeing affecting the volumetrics as well if I wanted to I could also boost this up to let's say three or now let's do four samples like that it's going to be a little bit high but it's going to allow us again to kind of like have some nice diffuse lighting inside of here so I'm just going to give that a few seconds just to show you a slightly more polished version of that and again the light and the shadows that this light produces will be nice and soft like that perfect okay let's go back to our shot cam over here let's render the whole thing out so I'll turn that off over there and currently I can just see like a little contribution from the light over here I can see a little bit of the light coming through the hood section over here of my lamp so I'm just going to go into and you're going to notice hopefully if I really played around with the exposure but as I boost the exposure of the light up even to the point where it blows it out I'm now going to start affecting the volumetrics which are in the scene and turn this into a volumetric light like that you see just with a simple click I can create a volumetric light inside of my scene just like that I'm going to turn this down a little bit I'm going to leave mine in an exposure of about 12 like that and now what I need to start doing is start thinking about what else can I do to start sweetening this image up over here so I've got kind of like this evening type of look over here with the Sun kind of like setting or maybe early morning or something like that to me looks really really really nice when I was practicing this the look of it is a little bit different to an extent it was more like a early afternoon type of look with a slightly brighter bluer sky outside but you can very easily color correct that as you see fit so what I want to show you next is how we can start adding some other effects inside of our scene that are somewhat related to indirect illumination but they also have a little bit to do with texturing as well so if I come over here and I'm just going to make sure that my interactive renderer is paused one of the things that happens is that if I take section of my renderer over here like this wall over here currently all the walls have the same color but what happens if I added a texture to this wall over here so I'm going to come into my outliner very briefly I'm going to make myself to Arnold standard materials very very very quickly now you might have seen this in some tutorials as well where people talk about color spill and what I'm going to do is create too brightly saturated Arnold standard materials so I'm going to make this first one which I'm going to call red over here and what I'm going to do is select this color over here and I'm going to choose maybe kind of like a nice bright saturated red like that maybe with a little bit slightly darker tone like that okay but a nice bright saturated red then I'm going to make myself another Arnold standard material and I'm going to call this one blue just to keep things nice and simple and again I'm going to choose blue which is kind of like my favorite hue of blue and then just give it maybe a little bit of a color like this there we go okay done very very very very simple okay so with my red and blue selected over here and we can see them over here I'm going to apply one of these textures to the sidewalls over here so I'll start off with the red one per se and I will select my object right click on it to go into face mode with a contextual menu and I will click on this face over here and then I'll go back into my outliner and I will right click either on the swatch or on the shader itself down here in the workspace and I will go assign material to selection and that will add a red material to that wall again because I'm still in face mode I can also select this wall over here and I will right click and it will add the Arnold standard material to just that one face make sure you do your face selection first so there we go ahead and close my hyper shade and if that worked I always emphasize the word if it worked there we go - I have to maybe reload and update my full scene to a second and there we go just took a second for the new textures to actually come out again if you're not seeing things whether things are missing from your scene or your interactive render or slows down please make sure you hit this update full scene button it's really really really useful okay so I'm just letting my render a kind of like tick away like crazy like that and what happens now is that it's perfectly fine you've got some nice too few shadows coming in through the window like that and you'll notice that the corner area of my renderer is pretty much you know kind of like just cast in shadows but there's this very clear line between the red color and the white grayish color of my stand Tyrael which i added into my scene now to make things kind of like look a little bit more realistic this bright color which is actually receiving light over here should actually have some light bounced off and it should have a little bit of color spill it's a little bit of red should appear inside of this material and to make that effect appear in Arnold we do have to have a few settings prepared the first one would be for us to come in and grab Bom Bom Bom some of our render settings over here and make sure that we actually have some more diffuse bounces so this diffuse bounces if I turn it now up to a value of 3 to start off with it'll mean that the light should bounce around three times inside of my scene now if I hit the renderer over here Arnold is actually doing this by default but it's a very very very very subtle effect and I mean it's pretty hard for us to even see over here what we need to do is to actually have a look at some of the properties which are inside the Arnold standard shader as well so if I come over here and I open up my hyper shade I'm going to look for my red material which I've left here on my workspace I'm going to scroll down its properties until I get into the Advanced tab over here in advanced we're going to have this bounce factor button over here if you having trouble seeing color bleed you can increase the value of this factor this bounce factor and I'm going to turn it way up high just so that you guys can see the effects of it to a value of five and trust me I'm going to come back and change it very quickly hopefully because I think that this will be way too much bounciness inside of my scene and as you can see over here as the renderer starts going it'll really sign kind of like started kind of like adding a little bit of red it's not as bad as I thought it would be there we go that's kind of like a little bit acceptable for me but I think that if I did like the whole section of the roof over here we're going to see a lot of color spill so again I can have my material selected over here in my attribute editor as well inside the Advanced tab let's turn this down to a value of four I think three or four is probably going to be more than enough bounces for you to be able to see this effect and what I want to do is also apply that bounce factor to the blue color that I made as well for the opposite wall which we still haven't had a look at I'm going to come into here into blue I'm going to scroll down to advanced and I'm going to turn on my bounce factor as well to quite a high value of four and then I'll close my hyper shade down and I will kill my render region and do another quick APR here and now now we're really starting to see those colors bleed off the side of the images just like this and kind of like my late afternoon image is kind of like starting to take off like this this really depends on if you want that color bleed effect or not and as you see we're starting to create some very very very interesting type of lighting now and our render time slowly going up up up up up up up as my interactive renderer is to having to do more and more work to an extent so what I'm going to do is I'm now going to start playing around with some of the settings and I'm going to try and get a slightly smoother render for us and I'm going to start turning on some of these settings and I'm picking up the samples to try and create a final image so we come back and it's only been about three minutes forty to render this out and it's quite alright there's still a little bit of noise and some of the volume indirect lighting over here so we might have to bump up those settings a little bit further but what I did want to show you guys very briefly for jump back into Maya is over here you can see that our render window over here has been all set up and I've just left open some of the settings that I left on the light samples and the render settings and you'll see that they're not necessarily that high as you might think most of the soft area lights and most the lights will probably be fine with a value of about three samples per se to soften up the color in those shadows the volume light and the mesh light might need slightly higher samples to be able to kind of like make sure that the effects kind of like of the volumetric lighting is all okay but again that's like a value of three or four should work just fine and for my total settings really all I used was a value of four which I could post up maybe two five or six if I really wanted to but it will probably add a few minutes to my render per frame my diffuse properties was set to three and I turned my volume indirect quality up to two to three as well to see if that had an effect in these areas over here so we're gradually getting closer and closer to get kind of like some good settings and you can actually see these when you're working if you take kind of like a small render region kind of like an you look at specifically the area that you actually want to be working in and if you start changing some of these settings and you start seeing the effects smooth out that's the way that you can start debugging kind of like the problems and just making sure that you're using the minimum settings possible when using Arnold or any type of raytrace shader you need to make sure that you're rendering out with the lowest settings possible because that keeps you efficient if I just whack this up to 22 and had a ridiculously long render which is really too long for kind of like anybody to wait around for it it might be that my samples just had an error that they were too low so it doesn't matter how much I boost this value over here it's going to be conditioned by other things that are inside of the system and it can also be the density of the volumetric lighting and other stuff like that that I might need to tweak or even turning down the exposure of this light will probably minimize that noise a little bit as well so as you get more confident with the software you're going to be able to see kind of like that it's a lot easier to work in small regions and then to start smaller softening out all of the effects until you can render out with the minimum settings possible and again three minutes forty for a render is quite reasonable if this was going to be finished for production I'd kind of like leave it rendering and maybe kind of like come back ten fifteen minutes later and be happy kind of like having that frame actually done now the next thing you might want to do is that you might want to save some of these files out so after the renderer has finished rendering out and remember we can render without having the interactive renderer turned on we can save either an original image or we can save a color corrected image and if I come over here back to the images that I rendered out over here the original image is that raw image oh so none of the color correction that I did the exposure looks really low but it really allows me to see all the detail that is actually in those shadows I can actually take this image into Photoshop and literally make it look like this over here now the thing is that this image over here is going to be very very very very hard to color correct and another thing that's very important is that if we want to save a version of this image in its RAW format jpg and PNG s they're not really great image formats for color correction because they tend to bake down the actual color space quite a bit so if I came over here and made sure that I had my own render view available to me if I'm saving one of these files what I might want to save is actually when I go in to save original instead of using a JPEG format I might want to save as an EXR format as well which if I go in if I had the Arnold standard view over here I might be able to just type in image dot ax are over there and hit save and I think that Arnold is going to be smart enough to figure out that that is an e XR so I've just opened up Photoshop and you can see that I have an e XR open over here as I mentioned before this is a great format for actually doing in any sort of color correction work inside a Photoshop or inside of your compositing package of choice because you can see that very quickly I can change the settings of the light there's loads of you know color information in the highlights over here so I can dim the image down very easily just by using the levels tool over here and I can also over expose the image as well and you see that it holds up really nicely in there as well so as I mentioned before it's really really really useful to have the Arnold renderer here for allowing us to debug all of our problems and to save things out but remember that there always will be two types of file formats that you can save which are at the original image which is not color corrected and the image that has any sort of color correction on top of it we'll talk more about in future about this multi-layer EXR because that's part of using the render passes which we currently do not have set up for this image over here but that's very much a summary of how to start creating some interior lighting with Arnold you can create very simple diffuse lighting but we want to direct where the light is coming from primarily we want the natural light sources like the windows to actually have some form of light that we can manipulate and control individually we want to have the actual artificial lighting inside of our scene if it exists and it's on you know available to us as well and control it to look like that and then we can start adding any type of directional or artistic light like for example adding the Sun to basically create a little bit of a highlight on this table and on this chair on the floor as well and also to have kind of like these gadre effects as well that you know people in 3d absolutely love that you have to kind of like add those of these effects all over the place but it's very important that the properties of the lights inside Arnold a very very very physically based so you get lots of indirect illumination for free you get lots of nice-looking lighting very very very quickly but we have to play around in the technical settings with the samples of the lights to soften shadow noise and we also have to play around with the different settings inside of the render settings for us to be able to render out our scenes effectively so with that we finish for this week this is of course just one of a few tutorials that I want to do about lighting in Arnold and again thank you very very very much for tuning in this week and just spending some time with me learning some meier and following along this little tutorial I hope you learn a lot from it I'll be looking forward to see you guys in the future if you liked the tutorial please drop us a like down below as well and if you've dropped by a few times and you want to subscribe to the channel well please hit the subscribe button and again I'll be trying to get a 1-hour video of my tutorial to you guys every week because it seems to be that's about as much time as I need to actually be able to explain something to the depth that I want to give you guys so with that we finished for this week thank you very much and keep learning and keep strong and I'll be looking forward to see you guys next week for another tutorial bye bye

Channel: yone santana

Views: 120,795

Rating: 4.9552574 out of 5

Keywords: Maya, 2017, Arnold, MtoA, Yone, Santana, yonesantana, lighting, interiors, game, cinematography, Autodesk, UK, beginner, 3D, learning, how to, interior

Id: mTGHba6yIr4

Length: 64min 45sec (3885 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 23 2016