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Maya Technical Paper

Gallery Style Rendering in Mental Ray

Unit 3: Transcription
Sam Tremain

This character shot needed a clean, nowhere space style environment. In other words, a minimal environment with only a single solid colour

Firstly ; open the render settings menu and, under the quality tap, select preview: final gather. This will enable the use of global illumination.

In this instance image based global illumination will be used. Under the Indirect lighting tab click the create button next to image based lighting. This will create a dome around the scene.

Click the folder next to the image name box and select an image. This image will be assigned to the dome and project onto the scene. It is also necessary to deselect primary visibility under render status. This will prevent the image from showing up in the render.

Create two directional lights. One light is the key light and should illuminate the front of the model. The key light should also have shadows turned on. The second light should be named as a rim light. The rim light illuminates the back of the model and creates highlights.

To change the colour of the background in the render the camera settings need to be adjusted. Open the attribute editor for the camera that is being used for rendering. Scroll down the environment tap and adjust the colour setting.

The next step is to make the ground plane blend with the background. This can be done simply by using a useBackgroud Shader. In the hypergrath menu select a useBackgroud Shader and set reflectivity to 0. Assign the material to the ground plane.

A shadow mask will need to be created In order to add a dropoff effect to the shadow. Attach a ramp shader to the shadow mask section. Use black and white on a circular ramp to create the desired effect.

Render the scene; the background will merge with the ground plane creating a nowhere space effect.

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