Pages

Monday, December 20, 2010

Lights in Maya

Maybe you know or maybe not in Maya we have 6 official types of lights: ambient, directional, point, spot, area and volume and one additional light source: any material with incandescence greater than 0.
I already read a lot documentation about all those light types but I never find them together in the same picture to see differences between them, so I decided to do this myself.
I made this scene
with all lights available from Maya, every light source is linked with one objects group
and in this way light will affect only those objects. For incandescent light I made a box to surround those objects to keep the light inside and from shape attribute I chose to make that box invisible for render.
 All lights are at the same highs and at the same distance from linked objects. All lights have the same intensity set on 2 except  incandescent light source where I set incandescence to 100 (you can do that from channels when the material is selected in hypershade). All lights have the same settings for ray trace shadow except volume light where we don't have those settings and incandescent material source which is not defined as a true light. All lights have no decay rate set, spot, directional and area lights are set to 45 degree from horizontal, all materials are standard lambert and all shapes are standard shapes, spheres have the same numbers of subdivisions, all boxes have no bevel.
Below you can see the difference between the lights, you can see how the same material react at the different type of lights, how each light react at the same intensity and what shadow make each at the same shadow settings.
 And now same scene with each light rendered closer:
1.Ambient light
2.Point light
3.Area light
4.Volume light
5.Spot light
6.Directional light
7. Incandescent material light

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...