Toolkit 2 - Lighting and

Rendering 1: Arnold
Pt2.
• Physical Sky Light.
• Mesh Lights.
• Ambient Occlusion.
• Photometric Lights.
• Depth of Field.
 Physical Sky Light.

• A physical sky in Maya is technically a heliodome. This combines a physical sky simulation
with the use of a sky dome; the sky dome is what drives the physical sky node in lighting the
scene. The heliodome aspect comes into play when we can then change the physical sky’s
properties; this being the position of the ‘sun’ in the scene to create different times of day.
This including the different colours for the different times of day; this leading to how the
system works as it is designed to a full 360 degrees rotation and pitch (hieght) for the sun in
the scene.

• To set this up I had to open the node editor in the windows tab before I could then load in
the Physical sky light from the Arnold tab lights menu.
 Physical Sky Functions.
What the settings do:
• Turbidity: means atmosphere/particulate matter in the air. The
more partials in the atmosphere the more haze there is to the
scene (acts like a fog)
• Ground Albedo: is bounce light from the earth, so when a light
comes in from the sun it hits the earth and the setting then
determines to what degree the light bounces up. E.g. the lower the
setting the darker the bounce light, the higher the setting the
brighter the bounce light will be.
• Intensity: brightness pf the sun in the scene. 1 being the default
brightness.
• Azmuth: 360 degrees rotation of the sun around the earth in the scene.
• Elevation: enable you to change the the height of the sun in the scene – good for changing the time of day. Elevation
also contributes to the change of colours in the scene – sunrise/midday/sunset.
• Sun size: size of sun in scene. Below that you also have the enable/disable sun option as well (sun visibility in render).
• Sun tint: changes the colour of the sun
• Sky tint: changes colour of the sky (the tints then affects natural colours in the scene).

Scene Before Settings Were Changed.

Setting up first Lighting - Sunrise:
• With this I set the Azmuth to 215, Elevation to 25 and sun size to 2 to get a sunrise lighting effect.
• Here I also set up the render settings so that there was no SSS and Volume Indirect and looked at upping the Diffuse slider to 4.
this to help with speeding up the render times as well as to reduce the amount of noise in the scene.
• To further clean up the shadows, I also look at the sky dome Samples and upped them to 3 to aid in reducing the noise in the
scene so that it appear cleaner.
Sunrise Outcome.
Midday Outcome.

Setting up second Lighting - Midday:

• Set Azmuth to 30 and elevation to 30.

• Render settings are the same as before.
 Sunset Outcome:

Setting up third Lighting - Sunset:

• Set Azmuth to 261 and elevation
to 7.043.
• Render settings are the same as
before.

Setting up fourth Lighting – Sky

tinting:
• Set Azmuth to 241.043 and
elevation to 14.609.
• Set sky tint to a rosy pink and sun
tint to an orange/yellow.
• Render settings are the same as Sun/sky tint Outcome:
before.
 Points to note when using
Physical Sky.
• Physical sky is unable to replicate a night time
setting.
• Can look like a standard effect; so you would need
to push it beyond its self as it lacks that extra umpf
to make the scene more appealing.
• So you could render out a scene and replace the
background to something more interesting and
natural – better sky and addition of clouds
>composited into scene in an editing engine.
 Mesh Lights:
• Mesh lights are devised from the geometries in the
scene (eg the sphere on the left).
• ! Polygons are the only geometry that are capable of
becoming mesh lights.
• The lines on the spheres are the projection nodes that
are used to texture the object it is parented to. These
nodes are known as place3d nodes; which are video
projectors that project the textures onto the geometry
(much like a cinema projector).
• These nodes are parented underneath the geometry, so
that if it needs to be moved it can be the projection
won't be lost.
• To access nodes
you need to go
into the hyper
shade editor
>textures > select
projection nodes
>middle mouse
drag to work area.
From there you’ll
need to Graph the
network making
sure all the nodes
are selected.
• Form there I the organized the node
into numerical order for clarity. And
then removed the 2d nodes attached
to the ramp, place3d and projection
nodes as they are not needed for this
mesh light.
• From there I then selected the first polygon sphere geometry and when to the Arnold tab in the attributes and then
changed the Arnold translator to mesh light from polymesh.
• This then allowed the floor bounce light to be seen in the Arnold render view.
 g.
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• I then proceeded to middle mouse drag the

projection node from the hypershade editor
to the colour node in the Arnold tab.
• By doing this, it then links up the place3d
nodes connected to the projection node to
then work and disply the texture on the
sphere.
• I then upped the exposure from 0 to 5 and
check the light visible box so that the sphere
can be seen in the render view and upped
the sample to 3 to help with noise clean up
later.

• This process was then repeated to the other

4 spheres in the view port.
Partial render to see if the lights are working.

I then went through and

cleaned up the image as best I
could using the render settings
to achieve this(see bottom left
corner).
 Render Outcome:

Then fully rendered the scene.

 Different Mesh Light Exposures Outcome:

Did a second render, here I changed the light exposure to see the variety of lighting brightness
options.
• With this exercise I played around
further with colours for the mesh
light.
• To do this I went into the
hypershade editor and played
around with the ramp colour
settings.
• With this I found it easier to edit
the colours in the attributes menu
as it was clearer to see.
Different Mesh Light Colours Outcome:
Points to note when using Mesh
Lights.

• Rendering with mesh lights takes a long time.

• They tend to create a lot of noise and scattering in
the scene which takes a lot of clean up to make it
look good.
• Lights tend to work poorly when in close proximity
to other objects, meaning more noise and
scattering that will need cleaning up in the scene.
Ambient Occlusion.

• Ambient occlusion is the decay of light based

upon the proximity of two objects; the closer
they are the more they are going to absorb the
light/block light between them (fall of in the
dark areas of an image).
• To start with I creating a physical sky light to
light scene and create a basic render of the car
in the scene, with this I then saved the fully
rendered image out to come back to later
(Beauty_pass).
• From there I then selected all
the objects in the scene as
assigned a new material to the
objects, went to shaders and
applied the Ai ambient
occlusion material.
• By applying the ambient
occlusion material it allows for
the finer details to be
seen/added to the scene, as a
sperate pass to be composited
in later.
Ambient Occlusion Settings:
• Samples: noise within the scene.
• Spread: from the source of the Ambient Occlusion.
• Fall off: how dark the shadows are in the scene on the Ambient Occlusion model. If the
setting is increased the model will become white.
• Near clip: where the camera is positioned – where the Ambient Occlusion is starting.
• Far clip: set to 100 – 100 units into the distance.
• *^ near/far clips are important if you are working within a room (indoors).
• White/black: colour of the Ambient Occlusion.
• From there I rendered a region and then reduced the noise
by upping the samples to 6 and then render again.
• The only problem at this stage is that the glass in the car
hold the same properties as the new assigned material and
we want to be able to see the car interior. So to combat this
go to the channel box >layers >and then select glass layer
and turn off its visibility (V).
• Rendered full image >save out of Maya> save as a
multilayer .exr > named it
farrari_Ambient_occlusion_pass.exr and then open both
In Photoshop:
• Open renders separately as
alpha channels since there is
transparency in the images.

• On the beauty pass

brighten image with
the levels (white
arrow).
 • Then I copied the
Ambient Occlusion
pass to the beauty
pass. From there I
then blended the
two layers using
multiply on the
ambient pass layer.

• With this I found the

image to then be too
dark so I then went to
the fill in the layer
menu and dropped it
down to 40%.
• From there I then flattened the image and changed the image size from a 32bit to a 8bit, by
going to mode and down to 8 bit and then setting the method to exposure and gamma in the
pop up window. The image can be save out as a jpeg.
Composite Outcome.
 Point to note when using
Ambient Occlusion:

• You need Ambient Occlusion if you

are trying to create realism.
 Photometric Lights.

Light fixtures.

• For this tutorial I had to download a IES light file

to then plug in to a light fixture in maya- these
help create more realistic lighting within maya. IES
Rotation stands for Illuminating Engineering system
of light. • Here I then downloaded a spark 220 down light,
to view said light I would also have to download
an IES viewer to preview the effect of the light
https://elslighting.com.au/products/downlights/
Down • In Maya the room provide has no windows or
position of doors, so is a closed environment. The room is
light going to be light with just photometric lights. To
(direction of do this I went to the Arnold tab and then went
the light ) down to lights > photometric light.
• Then went through and set up the preferences
for the light, to do this I used the attribute editor
to bring in the photometric IES file which was
saved into the sourceimages folder as it is
something that has to be plugged into Maya.
• From there I set the preferences to exposure 6,
samples to 3, radius 3 and looked at turning off
the volumetric shadows.
• I then positioned the light in the scene to the light fixtures in
the ceiling. With this I point snapped the light (V to snap) to
the centre of the fixture. I then hit f to focus of light and
looked at bringing down the light so it is just below the
geometry (used centre line as a guide).
• From there I then duplicated the light positioned in the next
fixture using V to snap to light point. These lights were then
duplicated a second time to then be transferred across to the
other side of the room using V to snap and third time.
• Then did an initial render.
• With these in place, I then loaded up the render view and did a test render. Found the lighting level to
be quite low so selected all four lights in the outliner and upped the exposure to 7 in the channel box to
save having to put it in another 3 times for the other lights.

• Alongside this I also cleaned up

the noise in the scene by going to
the render settings and then
setting the volume indirect to 0,
SSS to 0, transmission to 1,
diffuse to 4/5, camera AA to 5.
and rendered full scene.
Photometric Lights Outcome.
 Depth of Field.
• Depth of Field is the amount of blurring that would happen in camera based upon the focal
distance of the camera its self.
• To start with I took an initial render of the scene to help with comparison later on.
From there I then selected the camera and went to
attributes and then the Arnold tab.
Camera Setting Functions:
• Camera type: Default setting perspective >standard
camera > drop dwon menu holds camera types – VR
Cam, orthographic, fisheye, cylindrical and spherical.
Each have their use depending on the style you are
aiming for.
• Exposure: amount of light emitted into the camera.
• Filter map: another way to change the tonality of the
render, so you can plug in an image to do so. > to do
this go to hyper shade > create a ramp > 2d text >
ramp > edit in attributes > middle mouse drag to fliter
map on camera > can add a vignette to the
image/scene *can help create realism within the shot.
• Rolling shutter: the way in which the shutter is
actually scanning the image.
• DOF: depth of field > have to check enable DOF.
• Aperture size: determines clarity of image, the smaller
the value the sharper it will be, the higher the value
the more blurred it will be.
• Focus distance: the subject you are focusing on, you
will need to find out the distance by selecting the
object you are focusing on and then going to display >
heads up display > object details > you want to look at
the distance from camera to then plug in the rounded
value into the focus distance.
• With these in mind I set the aperture size
to 0.500, the distance to 39 and enabled
the DOF.

• Aperture Blades: Blades we would have

on physical camera shutters; will also
determine the shape of the Bokeh
• Aperture Curvature: curvature from
point to point in Blades.
• Aperture Rotation: rotation of Bokeh.
• Aperture Aspect Ratio: change in overall
shape based on aspect ratio of the
camera
• UV Ramp: change the overall effect of
the blurring.
• What is Bokeh? It is a Japanese word for
blurring, Bokeh describes the effect in
the background of the image, meaning
there is a high degree of blur which then
distorts the shapes in the distance
depending on the aperture blades.
Depth of Field Before Clean-up.
 • I the set up a render region
and then set the aperture
size to 0.5 > blades set to 3 >
curvature to 0 > rotation to 0
and aspect ratio to 1.

• Here I also set up the render settings to volume indirect to 0, SSS to 0, transmission to 1,
diffuse to 5, camera AA to 5 and specular 3 and then rendered full scene.
Depth of Field Outcome.
Points to note when using Depth
of Field:
• DOF takes a long time to render and will be grainy in certain
areas.

• If you create render with DOF in them, they will be in there

permanently. Meaning you can no longer go back to a
shaper image. > ideally take a sharpened image and then
take it into a compositing engine and add depth of field that
way in post production. Which will then help speed up
production time in terms of rendering