Lecture Notes

 

1.Grades & Books

Grading:

  • 5% Attendance (20 points off for absence, 10 points off for late)
  • 5% Participation
  • 25% Homework
  • 65% Projects

The assignments are as follows:

Summer 2007 Texture and Lighting Assignments

Sign up at snapgrades.net now.

Software Used: Maya 8.5, Mental Ray, Photoshop, After Effects

Maya Help: Search for “Limitations”

To note current maya bugs/issues and sometimes how to work around them.

Bibliography:

  • The Special Effects Handbook (for Maya 7 and 8): Alias
  • Texturing : Concepts and Techniques: Dennis Summers
  • Digital Texturing & Painting: Owen Demers
  • Digital Lighting & Rendering: Jeremy Birn
  • Advanced Maya Texturing and Lighting: Lee Lanier
  • Learning Maya 7 Foundation: Alias
  • Maya Professional Tips and Techniques: Lee Lanier
  • Maya Visual Effects: The Innvoators Guide: Eric Keller

2. Lighting & Cameras

Lights:

Default Lights.

Maya creates and deletes a directional light for you.

Intensity: brightness of light

Can be negative to subtract light.

Directional

Icon: parallel arrows (scalable)

No decay

Point

Omni directional from a point

Light bulb / candle

Has decay

Expanding shadows

More subtle shading

Ambient

Ambient Shade =0 then

Non-directional light
Simulates diffuse scattered light
Lights the dark/shaded areas uniformly.
No decay
No spec
No bump (if no other lights in scene)

Ambient Shade > 0 then

Acts more like a directional light

Ambient Shade = 1 then fully directional.

Area

More realistic highlight sizes (straight long like neon lights)

Soft lighting distribution

Better shadows that vary from hard to soft

Can scale it non uniformly.

Bigger it is the more light that is emitted.

Depth map shadows do not reflect the size and orientation of the area light.

Spec on anisotropic is poorly defined.

Volume

Sphere’s cylinders, box or cone.

Can see a visual icon of where the light falls.

Color Range section lets you blend light colors.

Volume Light Direction is changeable.

3/4 Light setup (Key, Fill, Rim)

lighting_rig

Key

Fill

Rim

Bounce

Parented to geometry

Follow character around.

Light Linking

Selection indicates utilization

Cameras:

Aspect Ratios: Matching BG plates.

Load D1 image as image plane.

Set camera preset to 35mm TV Projection

Fit to Size image plane.

Display Options

View Film and Resolution Gates.

Overscan = 2.0

Creating a Camera turn table:

Several ways:

Automatically in Maya
Manually (better)
Better because you can then change the angle and rotation of the curve and the camera stays with it.
1.Set the number of frames you want the camera to animate around with to be your scene number of frames.
450 is a good speed.
2.Create Circle

Curve circle button

3. Create Camera with aim
4. Create a locator
5. Point constrain the aim to locator

Select locator first then aim

Animation->Contrain->point

6. Attach camera to motion path

Select circle first then the camera group

Animate->Motion Paths->attach to motion path

What is a good camera move:

Flatten tangents.

No jerks.

Smooth transitions. (fade in fade out)

Slow to show off textures and lighting.

Almost no animation.

3 Light setup (Key, Fill, Rim)

Google: Studio Lighting Techniques:

http://www.vividlight.com/articles/1615.htm

Homework

Websites to sign up at:

www.snapgrades.net

http://area.autodesk.com

www.highend3d.com

www.thegnomonworkshop.com

Interior Room Lighting.

Do chapter 1 exercise.

Render Logs

http://www.symphonicenergy.com/d/node/997

 

See the above link description for a discussion about render logs and the tail program.

 

When hardware rendering on the command line be sure to set the project directory like so:

 

render -s 702 -proj "G:\DEVELOPMENT\Fluids" -log logs/702_6_20_07.log "G:\Development\Fluids\scene
s\FountainRender.20.mb"

 

702 is the starting frame number. 

Windows Tail Program

This is a link to the download page for the program tail.  Tail was designed and is primarily used on linux systems to monitor the updates to a text file.  Basically it continually reads the contents of the file, unlike most programs that make a local copy of a file in memory and then don't read or write to disk until commanded to do so.

 

This works great for RENDER LOG files!!! Most productions houses have a version or conglomeration of tail programs (combined with grep and sed) that will search for certain text strings like "ERROR" or "Warning" and then highlight them and send an email or beep or notify a database of some sort.  These programs combined with scripting languages are the beginings of a render support department that monitors renders every night.

 

Use this program to in conjunction with the render command to generate a log file of your own like so:

 render -r sw -s 389 -log logs/389_CloseUp_6_14.txt scenes/FountainRender.20.mb

Notice the "-log" flag and the specification of a log file that is in your "logs" directory.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=51715