Chapter 3- Shading, Texturing, Lighting and Rendering using MAYA | FREE tutorial , lesson & video training | Beginner

Chapter 3 - Shading / Texturing, Lighting and Rendering in MAYA (Beginner tutorials & video lessons)

	Author - Saju Asokan
	Last Updated: June 27 2009

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Key Topics

Introduction to Shading in Maya

Rendering in Maya

Basics of Lighting in Maya

Tuning a Material's attributes in Maya

Assigning a Bump Map in Maya

Creating Shadows in Maya

We will look into more about lighting in Maya in this page.

Rotate, Zoom and Pan the panel view such that you are able to see the whole scene through the view. When you look through the light, in the panel, you can see a green circle in the center, which is the cone of the light that gets cast on the objects in the scene in Maya. Those objects that fall under this circle gets illuminated. You can increase that circle's radius by increasing the cone angle of the light. Change the 'Cone Angle' to 90 in the Channel box.

Now go to the attribute editor and change the 'Drop-off' value to 6.0 . The drop off value will make the perimeter of the spot light smoother in Maya. You can see that the Light Shape attribute's image at the top right changes to a smoothed sphere. If you don't increase the drop off in Maya, the light will cause a sharp distinction between the area where it falls and the area outside it. The circle of lighting will be very intense on the falling surface as shown in the image. But with drop-off, it will be smoothed out.

Increase the Intensity of the light to '3'. Now click on Panels > Perspective > persp from the menu inside the persp panel. So far you had been looking through the light (in order to align it's position and orientation) in Maya. Now you switched back to the persp panel. Render the scene and see the result.

You will notice that though we have illuminated the scene, it is far from perfect. The key element in lighting is to maintain the minimum but adequate number of lights to illuminate the scene. The problem with our scene is that we have only a single source of light, which fails to add dimension to the other sides of the objects. So we need to add more lights in Maya.

All we need to do is Duplicate the existing light and re-orient it in Maya. Select the existing spot light and click Edit > Duplicate or press Ctrl+d. Now you have one more light and it is currently selected in Maya. Once again click on Panels > Look through selected to view through the newly duplicated light.

Pan and rotate the view so that the view through the light looks similar to that in the image shown. (The new spot light points from the direction opposite to the first light)

Switch back to the view through the persp view (Panels > Perspective > persp) and render the scene in Maya.

We will learn how to create shadows in the next page

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3DS MAX Tutorials

BASICS

	C01: Getting Started with 3DS Max
	C02: Viewports & Cameras
	C03: Texturing, Lighting, Rendering
	C04: Keyframe animation

INTERMEDIATE

	C05: Primitive Modeling basics
	C06: Primitive Modeling continued
	C07: Setting up a Scene
	C08: More on Materials & Textures
	C09: More on Lighting
	C10: Fire Effects in 3DS Max
	C11: More on Keyframe animation

ADVANCED

	C12.1: Modeling a human Head
	C12.2: Modeling a Female Body
	C12.3: Modeling a human Arm
	C12.4: Modeling a human Leg
	C12.5: Combining the human model
	C12.6: Modeling a human ear
	Ch-13: Character rigging

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