From the course: Maya: Rendering in Arnold 6

Setting area light attributes - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Maya: Rendering in Arnold 6

Start my 1-month free trial

Setting area light attributes

“

- [Instructor] Lets continue exploring the properties of an Arnold area light as implemented in a Maya area light, to see the effects more clearly let's disable global illumination. Go into the render settings. In the Arnold renderer tab, to ray depth. Lets just bring the diffuse and specular rays down to zero, and close the dialogue. Lets render Arnold in this camera north view port. Choose renderer, Arnold and start the interactive production rendering. By default the area light has a spread of one, which means it's going to spread out equally across a hemispherical value. Lets change that, select the light, go into its attributes with Control + A, and open up the Arnold section, and we'll see spread. If we bring that all the way down to zero, the rays of light coming from this area light will be precisely parallel, well that's a bit too extreme so lets change that. Lets bring the spread value up to 0.5, changing the spread doesn't change the total amount of illumination, it just changes the distribution pattern, and with a narrower spread, we're going to get more of a hotspot in the center here, so lets reduce the exposure to compensate. Bring that down to a value of six. We can also change the color temperature, let's enable use color temperature, and set that to a warmer color of 4800 degree Kelvin, and additionally we should increase the samples because it's going to come out pretty grainy with a default sample value of one, lets increase the samples up to three. That looks pretty good, now we just need to duplicate this to the other light fixtures. We'll change the rendered back over to view port 2.0, let's take a look at this in the top view port. We've got one light over here and we need a total of four, one for each of the four rectangular light fixtures. With that light selected lets rename it, we'll call it light ceiling quad O one, and with it still selected go into the edit menu, and choose duplicate special, options, reset the settings if necessary, we want to push this over 400 centimeters, set the translate X value to 400 and click apply. Now we've got another light ceiling quad O two. We'll duplicate both of these, select the first one, hold down shift and select the second one, back in our duplicate special options, go to edit, reset settings. We want to duplicate both of these down to these other two light fixtures, set translate Z to a value of 700 centimeters, and click duplicate special, Now we've got four lamps, we can go back to our camera view, switch its renderer back over to Arnold. That's how to control the distribution and color temperature of a Maya area light rendered in Arnold.

Contents