Chapter 15. Creating Lights


Lighting is an essential part of creating a scene. Whether it's photorealistic or heavily stylized, the light controls the look, warmth, mood, and visibility of the scene (Figure 15.1). Lighting in Maya holds many parallels to film lighting. The same techniques that aid painters and filmmakers will aid you in deciding how to illuminate your scene.

Figure 15.1. From dimly lit warehouses to bright fields, lighting controls the mood of your scene.


Lighting in Maya has advantages and disadvantages over lighting in the real world. Lights aren't visible in Maya, so they can be placed anywhere, even in plain view of the camera. Placing a light anywhere lets you highlight certain parts of a scene for dramatic effect (Figure 15.2). For instance, you can create a "negative" light to darken an area, which helps to create a moody scene by keeping areas obscured. Additionally, you can set lights to only illuminate specific objects, allowing you to bring a character or object away from its background.

Figure 15.2. Use of heavily contrasting light in this shot highlights elements in a classic film noir look. Image by Raf Anzovin.


Lighting comes with its own set of problems, however. Light in Maya doesn't perform like light in the real world. In the real world, light hits an object and is partially absorbed; then, having changed its properties slightly, it continues to bounce around almost infinitely. In Maya, light stops at the first thing it hits. This means your scenes are darker than a real world scene with the same lighting, because all the light is absorbed instead of scattered. Additionally, the lack of scattered light means your lights are more limited in effect, only illuminating things directly in their area of effect. To compensate for the dark and limited lights, you must use many more lights to fill in blanks.

Keep in mind, though, that the more lights you have in a scene, the longer the scene will take to render. The trick to lighting often comes from finding the right balance between appearance and render time.

In this chapter, we'll look at lights and lighting techniques, and the tradeoffs you must make to balance a realistic lighting setup with valuable render time.




Maya 7 for Windows and Macintosh(c) Visual Quickstart Guide
Maya 7 for Windows & Macintosh
ISBN: 0321348990
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 185

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