BSA225 - Week 11 | Lighting in Maya

Maya has two different menus for lighting. Let's start with the standard ones. 

We can find these under Create > Lights. We have to make sure though, that these are supported by Arnold, they'll have an Arnold Tab in the Attributes Tab. 

Standard lights

Directional Light

The directional light imitates the outside sun light. Colour or Intensity can be changed under the Attributes. However, it is better to control the light's intensity with the Exposure. 

 With Angle the shadows get more diffuse, we can also increase the samples to get rid of the noise.

 To stop casting a shadow but still keeping the emission, we can decrease the Shadow Intensity to 0.

Another handy thing is that we can control  what objects the light is actually hitting on. Under Windows > Relationship Editors > Light Linking > Light-Centric select the light and deselect or select the objects the light is supposed to have an effect on.

Spot light
Increase or decrease the Cone Angle to make the light bigger or smaller. With T we can either control the source of the light or the hitting point. Penumbra Angle and Dropoff make the light more diffuse.

A very cool effect is to create fog to see the  whole light from source to hitting point. Select the light and open the Render Settings > Arnold Renderer > Environment. Create an aiAtmosphereVolume in Atmosphere. Now we can control the Density in the Attributes window.

Arnold lights
Area light
This is probably the light we are going to use the most. The line indicates the direction of the light. There are three shapes available: quad, disc and cylinder. 

 Physical sky
The lighting is generated by the top half of the dome and it simulates sunlight. You can control the time of day (good for outside settings) by rotating the light.

 

Skydome light
Here we can also load HDR images to create a 360 light dome. This will reflect on the materials as well.