Visual Development - Lighting & Mental Ray 1

The first step in Visual Development is learning what lights do and how they cast shadows and how to set up some standard render settings in mental ray.

We were given an reference image and had to match it as closely as possible by adding lights and adjusting their settings as well as the render settings. All the geometry was given to us because the main focus was nailing the lighting.

darn gif artifacting

I used two lights when recreating the scene, a directional light and a mental ray area light. The directional light is supposed to emulate the sun coming through the window. The general position of this light isn't very important because it is just a wall of light coming from one direction. What really matters is the rotation, this needs to be spot on to get the placement of the shadows just right.

On the other hand, the rotation of the area light is not very important, but the position and even scale is. With a normal area light, rotation would matter because it is a flat plane, but with the mental ray area light set to a sphere shape it does not matter because light is emitted evenly in all directions. This is used to emulate the effect of a lightbulb.

default maya area light

spherical mental ray area light

Like I previously mentioned, the scale on the mental ray area light matters because that effects the softness of the shadows. The softness of directional light shadows can be changed with the raytrace settings in the attribute editor.

The bottle took some extra work because it is supposed to look like glass and refract light appropriately, which by default it does not.

not bending light correctly

To fix this, the raytrace options for reflections and refractions under the render settings must be changed to account for all the surfaces that the light travels through (which for this glass is 4) and add 1 or 2 more to be safe (The Max Trace Depth is the reflections and refractions added together).

This project was a great way to get back into the workflow of shading and lighting and understand some concepts I haven't really applied since I first learned them.