Maya Lighting Test Update

I have had another attempt at lighting the wine glass, trying to create more highlights and black reflections in the upper part of the glass without having to change the backdrop or drastically changing the lighting.

I wanted the backdrop to remain the same, grey at the base with a gradiant to white, but I also wanted more detail in the upper parts of the glass.

I decided that changing the lights would be pointless as I believe that the image is well balanced and correctly exposed etc. So I changed the material values of the backdrop so that more balck and white details would show. This is the result:

This one actually required barely any Photoshop correction at all, the contrast levels had been adjusted within Maya, so they where close to what they needed to be, and the subtle, but necessary blacks/greys and whites in the upper part of the glass are now present without the rest of the image being affected.

The reason I wanted to get the lighting as good as possible in Maya rather than doing loads of work in Photoshop is because when it comes to animated sequences, Photoshop can’t help you. SHake can be used to correct colours and other such things but it’s not quite as intricate as doing a single image in Photoshop.

I shall post some close up details that I quite like later, such as the interesting areas around the base and top of the neck etc.

Maya Lighting Tests

I have been learning AutoDesk Maya for more than 5 years now, I mainly use it for experimentation and just simply learning the program itself. It takes so much time to make an animation in Maya that it’s not always a good thing to have a project running alongside school/college/uni projects. I tend to leave it for the summer holidays when I have plenty of spare time, using at least two evenings a week to practice.

But since starting uni I have baring used it, having so many other things to think about. Now I am settled in more, and the Electives have started (5 weeks to build a photography portfolio), I should have more spare time to work with Maya. Below are just two of the simple lighting exercises I have been working on, using a diamond and a wine glass in two completely different lighting set-ups that mimic realistic photographic studios. Or at least, that is my aim. The wine glass and diamond, as well as all the materials (making the glass look like glass, etc.), lighting, backgrounds, everything are all created by me.

One of the most common things that people seem to assume about 3D computer graphics and animation, is that some of what imagery they see was already in existance before I started working. Everything has to be created by the artist in 3D cgi, every aspect of everything. From the geometry, to the lights, to the background, everything, and every little detail within. For instance the lights aren’t simply there, illuminating the object/s by default, they must be correctly positioned, the intensity must be set, the colour must be set, the type of light that it is must be set. There are hundreds of different aspects to creating lights, and then you’ve gotta go and do it again for the second, third, fourth, fifth light in the scene, each with completely different settings to cater for the different postion each light must take. Just as in real photography, lighting is extremely difficult.

For this I used a basic three light set-up: A Key-Light, a Secondary Light, and a Fill-Light. Various virtual reflector boards where used to bounce the lights around to create subtle highlights etc. Shadows are laways a problem, so a very low intensity ambient light was used to soften them off slightly more so.

On the larger Hi-Res images that I possess, the detail in the glass and diamond is very intricate, unfortunately it is lost in these smaller lo-res versions.

I shall post better versions of these as I progress and improve.