From the course: Maya and After Effects: Product Visualization

Image-based lighting with a Skydome map

From the course: Maya and After Effects: Product Visualization

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Image-based lighting with a Skydome map

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- [Instructor] In this chapter, we'll be applying materials to our product. And in order to get a good sense of what those materials might look like in a final rendering I want to apply some lighting to the scene. And just to keep thing simple, I'm going to light the scene with a skydome light with a high dynamic range image. To simplify matters, I'm going to hide the grid just go up to the main menu, choose Display and turn off the grid. And also I'm going to hide the camera layer that I created previously just disable visibility for the camera layer. And let's create an Arnold skydome light. In the main menu, choose Arnold, Lights, Skydome Light. And now we can go ahead and do a test render directly in the camera viewport. From the viewport menu we can choose Renderer, Arnold. And then we get a little floating window here and that's the Arnold Viewport Renderer Options. I want to press the play button here the red triangle and that will begin the render process in the camera view. So once that's rendered a little bit we can go ahead and press stop just to save our CPU and now let's make some changes to the skydome light. It's currently selected, if it's not, you can go ahead and click on it to select it. And let's open up the attribute editor, I'll use the keyboard shortcut Control + A. In the Ai skydome light shape node attributes we can assign something to the color. So click on the create input node button that looks like a checker box next to the Color and then in Create Render Node dialog double-click on File and now we have access to that file node's parameters. Let's rename it, we'll call it env_texture. Now, we need to browse for the file we want to apply. So go to the Image Name field and click on the browse button and in the current project source images is a high dynamic range image which is labeled boiler_room_8k.hdr and this is from the website hdrihaven.com which provides free HDR environments for usage in any project or production. In the preview, we see a boiler room image which would be appropriate for an industrial backgrounds. We're not actually going to see this background in our rendering it's just going to be the light source. Go ahead and click Open and that might take a moment to load, but once it does we can go ahead and re-execute the Arnold rendering in the viewport here. We can click on the play button and again, it might take a moment to load, but once it does we will see it in all of the viewports as well as in the Arnold rendering. Okay, now we've got some lighting in our scene and we can see that we're getting some reflections in the objects. And this is pretty good for a temporary lighting setup. We just want to make a little bit brighter and so we want to go into the skydome light parameters. We can select that skydome light in the viewports and then go into its attributes and we have the exposure which is the brightness. If we increase the exposure by one integer, we'll double the amount of light in the scene. Let's set the exposure to a value of one and we see that update interactively here. And that's a pretty good exposure, it doesn't look like it's over exposed too much. You might want to bring it down just a little bit, let's bring it down to may be 0.9. And just to keep our scene organized, let's also put that skydome light into its own layer. With the skydome light selected go back over to the Display layer editor and click the button to create a new layer and add the selected objects and then double-click that layer and rename it skydome_layer, click Save and now we've got a temporary lighting setup for testing our materials.

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