Studio Arts Maya 101 Class 7 9/18/2019

Hello everyone!  In the last class I talk about Shading in Maya, the Maya Hypershade, Creating Maya Lights, and Setting up your Render Setting for Batch Render.

In the Hypershade, I showed you how you can create shaders, AKA materials to apply to your geometry meshes.  These shaders have attribute with sliders that allow you to change the color, ambient, diffuse, transparancy, glossiness, bump maps etc.  Within these same channels, you can connect different texture nodes to add more complex colors and texture.  Textures can be procedural, or can be an image referenced by Maya.

Next I assembled some simple geometry in a scene to demonstrate the different properties of Maya Lights.  I demonstrated how to change their intensity, color, direction, shadow properties, and decay rate.

To check how my lights looked, I made sure to press 7 in my viewport window, so that lights are enabled.  Also it is worth reminding you that 6 will turn on textures if you have any in your scene.  Once I was satisfied with my lights, I would render my scene, which produced a higher quality image.  This is where I would use the Maya Renderview window.  If I wanted to see my texture or light changes update in real time, I could use the Maya IPR Render, which allows me to select a small section of the image and use that area to see every change update.  I can use Keep Image in the Renderview window to save a series of renders and scroll through them to help me compare.

One I am satisfied with my light set up, I went to my Render Setting window to setup my scene for Batch Render.  In the common tab, I can set Maya to render a sequence of images based on my timeline.  I can select the file format, resolution, and set the camera to render from.  I also can confirm where my render images will go once finished.  If you have your Maya project set up properly, it should go into the images folder of your project.  Next, I went to the Maya Software Tab to set attributes like image quality, motion blur, and raytracing which affect shadows and reflections.

Once my render settings are in place, I initiate the Batch Render, and watch the status of that render in the Script Editor.  Once finished, I demonstrated how you can take that image sequence and open it in fCheck or whatever compositing program you are using.

Tutorial Videos:

A nice little video about Maya node editing in general

Very basic light demo in Maya

I don't have a video tutorial for the render settings at the moment, because most of the ones that exist are for Arnold which we will cover next week.  If you want you can just search youtube for Arnold Render settings in Maya, if you want to get primed for class.