V-Ray in Maya: Lighting and Rendering Your 3D Models

hey everyone today we're going to take a look at how to create a clean professional looking render over 3d models with v-ray and maya we will set up a backdrop camera lights and create a turntable animation to present our models so with that let's get started so here we are in maya we have our character all modeled textured and we're ready to render him all right we're going to be using maya 2020 and vray next for this tutorial but you'll be able to follow along as i'm not using anything exclusive to v-ray next so the first thing that we need to do is go ahead and create a polygon primitive and just create a plane i go ahead and just start out with just giving this a height in width of one by one scale it up and this is simply going to be our backdrop so i'll go ahead and just scale this out until we get a nice size and i'll just go ahead and type in values like maybe by 500 and then that'll be wide enough i'll go ahead and right click go into edge mode and i'm just going to move this back i want to move this really far back and this is going to be the start of our backdrop and then i can simply hold shift and move this up and we got a nice backdrop now what i typically do i don't add too many subdivisions but what i want to do is shift right click and we can do a bevel edge and with this bevel edge i want to go ahead and just give this three segments something like this will work now if i go ahead and hit q and hit three we can see that our backdrop stays planar and then starts to go out uh into the back and we can move and position this however we need to um later on right so if i want to make this wider i can just kind of scale this out like so as you can see we can just scale it out like so and i can maybe move these vertices back so a nice and simple backdrop for our character all right and i will go ahead and make sure to move this up forward so this holds uh the way that we need it you can of course right click add multi-cut and then just kind of add one right here in the middle uh like so just to kind of help with that smoothness but we're not gonna spend too long on this let's move on to cameras so now that we have our backdrop set up let's go ahead and set up a camera so what we want to do is i'll just go to panels and perspective and new alright so now you can see i'm in perspective one that's the new camera i'll go ahead and just call this render cam okay so with this being our render cam the first thing i i typically do is go ahead and set up the resolution gate so now we can see exactly what we need to see and then we're going to frame our character there's not going to be anything too crazy we won't be using vray physical camera for this um as we're just using simple lights all right so now that i have this i will go ahead and move the plane down for our backdrop and then maybe jump to the side here and just make sure that it is just barely clipping the bottom of the plane all right and then now that we have this positioned the next thing i want to do is hit control a for attribute editor and pop up the camera settings so you can see we have render cam or if you don't have anything selected you can also hit the camera attributes icon right over here now whenever i'm doing renders like this i typically increase our focal length okay to something like 50 or 55. what that does is it minimizes or lowers the amount of distortion on our model and a focal length about 50 or i would say 45 to 55 is typically what your natural eye sees so that's a little bit easier for people to view at all unless we're doing landscape shots or environment shots you'd want this uh to be about 50 because landscaping environments can be about you know 20 to 30 if not lower you can go ahead and adjust your camera clipping planes if you see some clipping but all in all we should be ready to go i like to use this right here which is our field chart and i just use this to center and kind of frame our character and maybe zoom out because we can see that the hammer is gonna kind of clip here so something like this should be fine once we're happy with this once we got it all centered and lined i will go ahead and disable the field chart and we can always lock our camera i always recommend going to view bookmarks edit bookmarks and then you'll get this window and just do a new bookmark so just in case you disable lock and you accidentally move your render cam you can simply go to view bookmarks and camera view so you always have that all right so now that we've set up our backdrop well we can go ahead and maybe move this up right now we can see if we need to widen it or lengthen it as needed now let's set up v-ray all right so what we want to do is jump to our render settings and you can see that we're using default arnold so we're going to switch that right over to v-ray so this is a complete fresh scene and then i'm gonna keep it at half 1080 so hd by 540 and then i'm going to go ahead and jump to our render settings we'll leave it at progressive for right now and we're going to go to gi and we're going to turn on our gi and if you're using vray next 2.2 which is what i'm using you'll have these settings otherwise they'll just have brute force but i'm going to go ahead and switch this to irradiance map and all i'm going to do is just lower our gi settings to low and then subdivs for light cache to 500 i'm just doing this so i can iterate and work faster okay so now that i have that we want to go ahead and create our lights so what i'm going to do is set this panel layout to dual panel layout i'm going to switch this panel here to render cam i'm going to switch this one hold by holding spacebar to perspective so now i can move around in this view here while seeing this fixed camera view all right now of course if we go ahead and render we're just going to get a simple black screen so what we need to do of course is to go ahead and add a light so we're going to use a nice series of v-ray rectangle lights so i went ahead and just created a v-rectangle light by hitting this icon here in the shelf and then i'm going to move this up and out so we can see it and we'll actually move this over and what i want to do is just really really increase the size of this all right i'm going to go ahead and increase this to about a size of 150 by 25 so you can see that this is a fairly large wide light now whenever you're doing renders i'm going for a nice soft lighting here and that's typically going to give us softer shadows which is exactly what we want and if you want to make sure like not to bump into the camera you can select your camera icon you can see uh my character is two scale he's about four feet tall around mid 100 centimeters and you can go to the locator and bump this locator up by like 25 so we can see our render cam in here so that's great so now that we have this light here we can go ahead and kind of just move it back and what this is going to be we can call this v-ray rectangle light and then i can just call this key right this is going to be the key light and your key light is typically behind your camera now it doesn't need to be perfectly aligned and not the same angle and frankly you can even set it at a nice rotation just to give it some a little bit of uh difference okay so with that we'll go ahead now and see what we got so this is the first light that we created and i of course need to make sure that i switch over to the render cam because we're too far away from our render and there we go so we can see what we have so far all right so that's looking pretty good as far as we can see what we need to see we can see all the textures coming through we can see the light and we have nice soft initial lighting with this so what i want to do of course is since we're not using displacement nodes or anything i want to go ahead and just subdivide this plane so what i want to do with that is i'll just go to edit delete by type history so i delete all the history in the channel box i can then go to shift right click and then just do a smooth and we can give this a smooth of about two iterations or two two divisions all right so that's going to give us something nice and then we of course need to give this a v-ray material so i'm going to go ahead and do a new material and we can see that i can go to v-ray and i can just do a simple v-ray material and in this v-ray material it's just going to be a simple clay material and i'm going to just go with kind of this light blue material that's a little bit desaturated to help the character pop off of it once we have that you can see if we go ahead and increase the reflection color quite a bit and then lower the glossiness so that'll make it less shiny so we drop it down to maybe about five six it's now going to start catching light so we can see our character is all set up and remember to go so we need to make sure our backdrop looks a little bit better i'll go ahead and let this render out and we get something like this all right so so far so good but what we need to do is things are still a little bit dark so i'm going to add some more lights so i'm using a nice simple the tried and true kind of three-point lighting set setup all right so i can take this light which you can already see i called key and then if i go ahead and duplicate it now i can go ahead and start to move this and position this at different parts of our environment here so you can see i'm going to just go ahead and just kind of position it where it's filling the light of the character okay so we can maybe come over here and maybe angle it a little bit more now this is typically at a much lower intensity right because we can see that our key light here is at about an intensity of 30 and we can see in our render that it's still pretty dim i want to bump that up to about 45 all right so 45 intensity multiplier and then our fill light here it can stay at 30 but we'll see if we need to turn that down a little bit so with that let's go ahead and do another render and let's see what we're looking at so that's going to go ahead and do its thing and great so we're already starting to look a lot a lot better we have some nice light now we've got some nice highlights on our character that we didn't have before and i'm actually going to go ahead and we can stop this and show some history so we can kind of see the difference between the two adding that fill light is really adding these nice highlights in on our character and then also increasing that main key light is giving us that nice direct lighting we want to make sure to just bring out as much detail as we possibly can on our character with you know just a core set of lights so now that we have this here and i'm going to call this one fill all right and if this is starting to get too bright we can of course drop that to about an intensity of multiplier of 25 and then what we're lacking here is we can see that we're getting a little bit flat on the other side on the left side of the character or looking at it from the right side all right what i want to do now is add what's called a rim light now rim light is going to give us is going to help bring this character off of this background so let's go ahead and do that so if i hit ctrl d for duplicate and then i'll go ahead and move it i'm going to go ahead and again position this right on the other side but this time again like i said it's going to be a little bit lower here so it's going to be more in line with the character and it's going to come a little bit more from behind and we'll move this back a little bit and it might come in view here now it's going to be right out of view now if sometimes you run into this instance let's say we'll leave it right here and we go ahead and do a render we can actually see now that the light is showing up in the actual render which we don't want so what i'm going to do is stop this i'm going to turn on ipr and ipr is going to allow us to iterate and move faster and i did that by hitting this little teapot here and you can see had a little play icon and then we can use this interactive rendering and this is great for iterating and making a lot of updates uh very fast so i want to select the light here and we're going to call this one rim and once we create that as or call that the rim light go down to your attribute editor with control a hit options and you can see invisible enable invisible and there you go now it won't show up in your render it is of course a little bit too close so what i can do now is simply move this where it's not as powerful or close to being in the shot and then now we can see what this is doing so like i said we're adding we're adding this in here as a rim light and what we can do is if you want you can also make this a little bit larger right so these are just long rectangular lights let's say we bump this up so it's a little bit uh thicker here or taller and we can see what what that is doing to our renders and we're using an intensity multiplier of about 25 so you can see we're getting this nice now highlights and rim effect on our character and it's bringing him off of the environment all right so we can maybe tweak work with this a little bit maybe increase the intensity so we're at 25 v and then intensity maybe is a little bit higher because we like this effect that we got that we got going on all in all i'm really happy with how this is looking we can maybe even move this and bring this in a little bit closer just to kind of balance out the lighting between the two sides right if we feel that that lighting is a bit too strong here on the environment we can lift it a little bit more off the ground and then bring it in a little bit closer so we get something like that all right so again depending on what you want in this case you can see now we're getting nice highlights the character is popping off the ground we have this nice almost vignetting effect where it's kind of darker off to the corners and the character is very well illuminated very well balanced there's nothing too hot and everything is overall looking good now along with messing with the size position and intensity of the lighting the other thing that i like to do is typically give it a little bit of a temperature so i change color mode of our lights to temperature and then you can see light color is disabled and i would combine both warm and cool colors so if our key light is going to be kind of the main light source so i'll go ahead and hit temperature here and actually this is a good time to jump to our light lister so i go to v-ray light lister you can see that we have that here and we can enable temperature here by increasing the key light here i'm going to go ahead and maybe type in 8500 kelvin and you can see it starts to give us a little bit of a blue tint and then our fill light can also be that 8500 so a little bit of a cooler light and then we can have our rim light be that nice warm light coming in from the back all right so again if we take a look at our lights here we can see we have key and fill and then our rim light is warm so it's it's cooler light and then warm light and that just adds a lot of visual interest to our renders and looks a lot better than just having you know neutral solid or pure white light all right so we went ahead and kind of changed the temperature and let's see what that does so i'm gonna go ahead and let that render and there you go so just by adding a little bit of temperature to our lights in color we get something that looks again visually more interesting so again warm light coming here from the rim and our key light and our film light are both a little bit warm excuse me cool and it's transitioning between the two so really nice and again as visual interest if we kind of look at this between the two that is the that is the difference here right so it looks quite a bit different um different in the sense that it looks better in my opinion all right so with that let's move on to the next part so i like where i'm at with the lighting a nice you know you really can't go wrong with this three-point lighting setup for your characters so what i'm going to do is just go ahead and stop that or stop the ipr render and then we're going to go ahead now and create or animate a turntable so i'll go ahead and group these up select these in the outliner and we're just going to call these lights and then we have our geo over here now what i typically do for a turntable right if you're doing stills this is fine but we want to actually rotate this character to create a turntable so create go to create and then you can see we have locator i typically use a locator and i just call this turntable anim underscore anim and then i drop this inside of my geo group then i take the platform my hammer which is positioned for rotation or whatever it needs to be and then my character and i can drop that inside this turntable and then you can see now i can rotate this locator now what i want to do is jump to my channel box editor and we can see that we want to be rotating in the y so if i right click and i do key selected right here on the y we want to go ahead and give this a lot more frames so i'm going to open up my time configuration and then i'm going to hit time slider and you can see that we have play every frame what i want this to be is 30 frames times 1 then i want the frame rate to also be 30 frames by default this is set to 24 but you can verify that that is set to 30. the main reason we're doing that is to give us more frames so we have a more fluid animation you can of course render out 60 frames per second if you have a machine that can handle that so now that we have that i want to go ahead and give myself enough frames so i typically recommend at least 10 seconds for a complete turntable so that means let's go ahead and just type 300 down here underneath the time slider and we're going to move this all the way to 300 and then so we have this now and we can rotate this a nice clean 360 degrees and then you can go ahead and key selected all right now you can of course do this at like 359 358 and then what because what that's going to do is if i go ahead now and let this run i will let this go and almost clipping there so i might move the camera a little bit back you can see that it slows up and slows down this is entirely up to you i don't mind it either way because you can you know continue to let it loop even like this and it slows down really at the focal point of the character which is the front all right now if you want to change this and you want to seamlessly loop you go and select your turntable anim locator that we animated or whatever you have your keyframes on and then we go to windows and then we go to animation editors graph editor here you can see that we have the curves all you want to do is just click drag marquee select and then set this to linear which is this icon right here what linear does is it removes any curves and interpolations and we can go ahead now and play that and you should see that it should seamlessly loop and it stays at a constant speed from beginning to end now again this is entirely up to you but i just wanted to make sure that i showed you this you can see that there's an ever so slight jump there that's because the last frame and the first frame are the same so a lot of times i just leave it and just remove that frame when i render or composite or i just adjust the keyframes but for the sake of this i'm going to keep this so i'll undo that a couple times and we're going to keep the curves on all right so that's how you set up that turntable there and like i said what i want to do at that last bit here is unlock my camera move him back just a little bit drop it down i mean we still want to make sure that our character is still the focal point and then if i rotate you can see that i got enough just in case you had a title bar or something you want to make sure that you're good there you can always use this we have the field chart you have film gate or resolution gate or you have safe title so safe titles like hey if you want if you're going to be having something up a top or border here you can use that so you can definitely have that a lot of times i basically work for with safe action safe action here which is this icon here just make sure that i'm not uh going too far out so i think this is fine here and we can keep him make sure he's nice and centered but there we go like i said we can lock this camera and then we can go ahead back to our bookmarks and go ahead and hit delete and the new bookmark now once you're happy with all that right we have to keep in mind we created an animation and well now i want to animate it right so you have to make sure to go to the render settings which i hit by this icon over here and go to animation and then animation disabled now we go ahead and do standard and then we tell it hey start frame 1 end frame 300 and then by frame 1 of course and then it's going to go ahead and bake this out here it's going to go ahead and save all your renders in the images folder in your maya project which means that you go to file set project and then you set this project to wherever that you need in this case it's just mine is this maya folder here and it's going to save it right here and then inside this images folder that's where it's going to drop everything once it actually goes to render so i mean i didn't change anything it's the same folder once that is done we can finally go to rendering and then go to render batch render now this will go ahead and start rendering it out and keep in mind that this settings doesn't work which is a little bit irritating because a lot of people think that hey render v-ray does not provide batch rendered options perfect that makes sense but it doesn't start the render so you got to make sure to go to render batch render and then it's going to go ahead i'm getting a windows firewall alert which is fine you just say allow access it's going to go ahead and start rendering and then let me go ahead and let a few frames run now i almost forgot is once you set the animation you have to make sure to set renderable cameras otherwise it's going to render the wrong camera in this case it would render our prospective camera so you change this to render cam and i always recommend you know hey do a low res sample so do something like 540 with low settings here and let it run to make sure there's no issues and if everything looks good great then you can go ahead and increase the final and for final resolution i go typically bucket and i increa i decrease the render region division so we have more buckets rendering threshold is fine at 0.01 maybe even a little bit high because i will go ahead and actually use denoiser for to clean up a lot of that noise which will save time in rendering so we'll have that there and we have our gi and i would crank this up to you know medium or high for irradiance map and then crank up light cache back up to a thousand or 1500 and just to kind of crank that all up at a much higher to get a much higher detailed render so again once you have all these settings which are um you know we can also say you know character render character underscore render and that will also render it with a specific name so we name it we tell it how many frames to render we tell it what camera to render what resolution and then we go ahead and give this final settings always use bucket for final renders not progressive and then increase your gi settings so now that i've done that you can go ahead now and just simply hit batch render again not hitting options just batch render and we'll let that go for a few frames okay so the render is continuing to go frame by frame you can see it down here it lets you know the percent percentage of each frame where it is in the gi where it is in the overall render and it goes ahead and outputs that i'm going to just go ahead and cancel that and we can now go to cancel batch render because i've already got a few frames and it says do you wish to cancel yes and then once that's done i can drag this over here and now we can see we have our character render rendered at full 1080 and we have the effects result in denoiser just grab either one of those because this is the non-denoised version which i mean we're not doing anything crazy um but here he is so you can see the denoise version cleans up a little bit uh and everything's looking really good so i'm really happy with how he turned out and everything looks fine so i can go ahead now and move on to the next part so hopefully you found this helpful in the next video i'm going to show you how to use render setup so now that you have this and set up with vrain lighting now we can use my render setup to render out ambient occlusion clay pass wireframe pass and have all that ready to go for our portfolios so as always if you found this helpful like and subscribe is always appreciated and thanks for watching thanks bye

Channel: On Mars 3D

Views: 8,432

Rating: 4.98 out of 5

Keywords: 3d art, tutorial, workflow, character, maya, autodesk, adobe, 3d model, render, rendering, light, lighting

Id: crzQTk8QhpI

Length: 28min 32sec (1712 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 06 2020