Introduction

The aim of this lesson was to create a 3D scene in maya using lighting.

Light

Lighting a scene in 3D is important to create atmospheric or appealing visuals that tell a story.

Lighting can serve two main functions:

• Technical – replicating real world lighting conditions: e.g. by using real world lights or creating gag effects like candles or a TV.
• Creative – using lighting to create a tone or contrast in an image. e.g. by focusing lighting on one spot or using different coloured lighting

Additive Colour Mixing

Additive colour mixing is where colours are mixed together to make white.

The RGB colour channel system is additive which means that red, green and blue mix together to create white – and this means that red, green and blue can be used to make any colour because white is made up of every colour in the additive way of colour mixing.

Lighting in Maya with Arnold

Arnold is the render engine that Maya comes with. It can be used to create lighting

In the Arnold>Lights category are the following lights which can be used to light the scene:

• Area – A surface that projects light.
• Skydome – An image-based environment light (for using HDRIs).
• Mesh – An object that emits light.
• Photometric – Simulated using real world light data.
• Portal – An area light that projects light from an outside source – like a window.
• Physical Sky – A simulated sky in Maya.

Additive Colour Simulation in Maya

I started by creating a polyplane to have a surface to light. Then, I went to the Arnold tab, Lights, and selected the AreaLight. Here is a screenshot showing this. The line coming out of the square shape shows the direction of the light.

I pointed the light downwards. In the attribute editor, I changed the colour of the light to Red and the intensity and exposure values to 10 and 5 respectively. I then set the spread to 0.1.

When using the lighting preview function, it gave me this:

I then duplicated that red light twice and positioned the lights in a triangle. I changed the other two lights to green and blue and that created this effect in the lighting preview.

This is the render – you can clearly see the Red, Green, Blue, Cyan, Yellow, Magenta and White.

Three-Point Lighting

Three-point lighting is a lighting effect which uses 3 lights to light a subject. This draws the viewer’s attention to the subject, and is particularly used when lighting faces. Here is an example:

Replicating a lighting effect in Maya

For this task, I replicated the lighting from a movie. Here is the still that I used from The Royal Tenenbaums and the renders I created in Maya.

Conclusion

I think this lesson was useful practise for lighting in Maya – something that is new to me. Considering additive lighting and techniques like three-point lighting will help me to light scenes in the future, of course with the added knowledge of knowing how to create an area light and change its settings to match the look that I want.