A week of Research and Tutorials
Hello everyone!
This week I have been focusing on finding good research materials and go through a couple of tutorials and exercises. To really get a feeling of being in control of my workflow I wanted to cover the basics again just in case there was any basic uses of the tools I was missing. I’ve focused mainly on the two tutorials mentioned below; one being more of an excercise:
http://www.3dtrainer.com/maya/lighting/
The first couple of videos where very basic and I didn’t really agree with with the set up of lighting he used for the first scene but it was good to see and think about how I would do it differently and maybe even more efficiently. The later videos had some good points and directed me into thinking new thoughts. For one I hadn’t thought about mapping a cutout on a lightsource colour to create a nice illusion that there were things offscreen. Overall I got some pointers, and it was good to go over some basics again.
“Lighting a Hallway” Instructor: Jeremy Engleman
I thought this was a really good tutorial. I was not aware that you could tweak the intensity curve of a light using the graph editor which I quickly realized can be very useful. He worked his way around creating bounce lights first which is opposite of how I usually light my scenes, but he made some good points showing that it can be a lot more efficient using a simple straight up standard for the bounce lights to make the lighting more efficient. There is of course a risk that the scene looks a bit off if the bounce is too even throughout the scene, but it could be a very good starting point. Anyway, I did this exercise while following his instructions and then I tweaked it a bit so it suited my textures a little bit better (we used this very scene during a lighting assingment in our Advanced 3d Course so I already had a textured version of it). It took about 7 hours and I used 14 lights. Since this was only an exercise I won’t be doing anymore tweaking on this one, although I know that there are some problems still that could be fixed to make it even better.
Here is the result of the exercise:
I have also UV-mapped my scene, which feels good. I have yet to make those curtains, but since modeling is not even a secondary part of this project it’ll just have to wait.
Now, that’s all for now I think.
It’s Christmas next week so I expect that I will be taking a few days off and so it may very well be that I won’t be posting next week.
Happy Christmas to you all!