Lighting Tutorials

In the lead up to the 3rd progress presentation, I've been doing a few lighting tutorials to improve my skills in that respect, since one of the things the lecturers picked up on in my last presentation was that I needed to spend more time developing my technical skills and bringing my lighting and texturing skills up to scratch.
Ryan lent me the Advanced Maya Lighting and Texturing book by Lee Lanier so I tried a tutorial he suggested from that to see how it went.

These are some screencaps from the finished scene. I followed the tutorial step by step but the LightFog attribute didn't work when I rendered it, as there is supposed to be a stream of light flowing in from the window, casting a shadow of the shape of the window on the floor. I am unsure if this is because I rendered in mentalray when the tutorial instructed to render in MayaSoftware. I had to render with mentalray because my laptop displayed error messages when attempting to render with maya software and wouldn't complete the render. I tried to see if this was related to an unloaded plug-in but has no success. I will attempt to fix this using the uni computers and then re-install maya on my laptop as it is pretty buggy and tends to crash a lot more than is normal.
The shadows in this scene are also quite crisp and clean cut when they should be a lot softer due to the candlelight lanterns used as light sources. Again, I followed the settings step by step and rendered in mental ray as opposed to MayaSoftware and as this is the only difference I can think of, I'll try tweaking the settings and rendering on one of the uni computers.

In addition to this tutorial I also created a small dining room scene. I used similar settings as I did in the first tutorial from the book Ryan lent me, and tried to get more comfortable with texturing with bump and normal maps to enhance the look of the dining room table, floor and walls etc. I also made a glass shader which looked great when viewed from some angles but from others it made the inside of the glasses appear black.

The LightFog effect again didn't work, and instead created a grainy effect outside the window that looked like a blizzard. The light emmited from the sportlight shining through the window in an attempt to simulate moonlight is too harsh and has clearly defined edges. Similarly the shadows again need to be softer as they have hard edges despite the soft light being emitted from the candles and ceiling lights.

As stated previously, I will attempt to render these scenes out again in MayaSoftware in uni, other than that I'll try and tweak some settings to see if it makes a difference in mentalray. I can't spend too much time on it though as I want to get started on some more media tests involving a short series of vignettes, which will recycle the same assets with small additions and tweaks to create new stories in the same scenes.