From the course: Maya and After Effects: Product Visualization

Flood lighting with Arnold area lights

From the course: Maya and After Effects: Product Visualization

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Flood lighting with Arnold area lights

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- [Instructor] The most basic type of lighting setup is flood lighting using some area lights. Let's set that up in our scene with the robot arm. We've currently got the Arnold renderer loaded into the perspective view. Let's switch that back over to Viewport 2.0. And previously we hid the Skydome light from visibility in that perspective view. Let's re-enable that visibility. Go into the Show Menu and turn Lights back on. We want to start with that Skydome light disabled and the easiest way to do that is to select it, go over to the channel box and set its intensity value to zero. And now it's effectively turned off. Let's create an area light. In this case, we could use a standard Maya light if we wanted to create lights, area light and that would be converted to an Arnold area light at redder time. If you use an Arnold light, you'll have a couple extra options. In this case, it won't really matter which we use. But just for the sake of completeness I'm going to go into the Arnold menu and go into Lights and create an area light. And it's going to be tiny. One centimeter on a side, located at the origin. Before we make any changes to it, let's just rename it. Select its name in the channel box and let's call it flood one AI area light and press enter. Now let's scale it up. Select scale X, Y and Z. Just drag your mouse cursor across all three of those fields and type in a value of 50. And now the light is 50 centimeters on a side. We can now see what that looks like in the camera view. Let's go over to that camera view and choose renderer, Arnold. And in the Arnold viewport renderer options dialog, start the rendering. And it may take a moment. In my case, I'm using the GPU renderer option. And so, that's going to take a second for it to think about the new lighting setup. Once it does, we see that it actually turns completely black and that's because, by default, the option to normalize illumination is enabled. We need to disable that. And to do that, we want to go into the attribute editor. I'll open that with the keyboard shortcut control A. And in that area lights shape note, we'll see an option down here, normalize. When that's on, then the amount of illumination will be constant regardless of the size of the light. If we turn it off, then making the light larger or smaller will change the amount of illumination. We want that to be off. So turn off normalize and in our camera view, we can see we got some light. Alright cool, we don't need the attribute editor anymore so we can close that and let's just temporarily position this. So we've got our translate X, Y and Z values. I'm just going to plug in some values. I'll set translate Y to 50 and translate Z to 30. If we orbit around with alt and left mouse button, we can see that the area light is positioned just at the edge of the cyclorama. Let's also angle it down. Back in the channel box, we'll set the rotate X value to negative 45 degrees and now the light is shining down on the subject. Okay, we got one Arnold area light. In the next movie, we'll double that up and we will art direct the look of our floodlighting setup.

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