Lab 3: Lighting and Shading
IDS252: 3D Animation, Spring 2015

Goals

The main artistic goal of this lab is to use lighting and shading to help convey the mood and meaning of a scene. The main technical goals are:

• Become familiar with the various rendering options including hardware, software and IPR.
• Learn about the different shaders in Maya.
• Learn how to use lights and create shadows.
• Deliverables: Two images with realistic shading and lighting that convey an emotion or mood. Place project and images in the designated folders on cs-render. Also see Evaluation Sheet (pdf).

Files and Folders

• When you create a new project for the assignment, place it on the cs-render drive in the folder: \IDS252Sp15\Lab3\MayaProjects\your_name.
• When you have completed the lab, please copy your two images over to the folder: \IDS252Sp15\Lab3\FinalImages\your_name

Digital Tutors

Go to the Introduction to Maya 2015. The following lessons are suggested especially if the Autodesk tutorials are confusing or if you want to go beyound the tutorials.

• Lesson 93: Understanding various light types
• Lesson 94: Controlling light color and intensity
• Lesson 95: Adjusting light decay and specular contribution
• Lesson 96: Altering the Render Stats of Maya objects
• Lesson 36: Applying simple materials
• Lesson 40: UV Basics
• Lesson 43: Adding file textures
• Lesson 37: Using ramps to drive material channels
• Lesson 38: Adding multiple materials to objects
• Lesson 39: Working with procedural textures

Part 1: Maya Tutorials (not collected)

• All of the folders and files that you will need for the Maya tutorials in this section are on cs-render in the folder

  \IDS252Sp15\IDS252Resources\Lab3Files\ Copy the entire Rendering folder (please copy and not move, so it is still there for others) over to the folder \IDS252Sp15\Lab3\MayaProjects\your_name (or wherever you plan on working) The Rendering folder is a project folder so you do not need to create a new project. Open Maya and set the project to this Rendering folder. These tutorials use a number of supplemental files: if you do not set the project, Maya may not be able to find all of the needed files.

• In Maya, go to Help → Tutorials. Click on the link Getting Started with Maya 2015. In the contents listed under Getting Started with Maya, do the following:

  • In the tutorial section Rendering. Do the following lessons:

    • Lesson 1: Rendering a Scene. Some of this will be a review. Skip anything related to animation. Only do up to and including "Rendering a single frame using IPR" Much of this lesson is review. Note, there are a few errors in the tutorial, e.g. when coloring the apple red, they have you create a phong materal and then call it appleSkin_blinn.
    • Lesson 2: Shading Surfaces. This introduces shaders. Note, they say to select a phong material for the orange yet the parameters (e.g. eccentricity) they discuss are for the blinn material. I suggested that you select blinn for this part so the parameters match. Of course, you can experiment with the Phong and PhongE as well.
    • Lesson 3: Lights, Shadows, and Cameras. Skip the animation of the camera.

  • In the tutorial section Polygon Texturing, do the following:

    • Lesson 1: UV texture mapping. You can use the same Rendering project. The Photoshop texture file you need (UVLesson.psd) can be found in the sourceimages folder of your Rendering project folder. Photoshop should be on all the computers in Ford 202.

  The above tutorials will not be collected.

  When done, please delete any *.iff files (e.g. all of those Apple.000x.iff files) or any files with "ipr" in the name. There are a lot of them, you don't need them, and they are really large. We don't want to run out of space on the shared drive!

Part 2: Expressing Mood

The goal of this portion of the assignment is to use materials, lighting and camera to convey the meaning of a word you have been given. You are to aim for as much realism as you can given your current technical skill.

• Create a new project, e.g. called Lab3Project, on cs-render in \IDS252Sp15\Lab3\MayaProjects\your_name.

• In class, you will be assigned a word representing an emotion, mood, atmosphere. To help you get started, see if you can answer the following about your word:

  • What color, colors, or color palette do you associate with this word? Are the colors bright, dark, light, saturated, muted, pastel, etc?
  • What kind of contrast (e.g. high or low) best conveys this word?
  • What scene comes to mind?
  • What camera position best conveys the word (high, low, far, close, ...)

  You are to make the scene as realistic as possible (given the lighting and shading skills you currently have). Generate two images:

  • Image 1: This image is to capture the meaning of your word. Carefully pick your camera angle and position, then render your scene to an image.
  • Image 2: Keeping everything else in the scene the same except one or more of the following: lighting, materials, and camera position. The goal of these changes is to alter the mood as much as possible from the image 1.

  Brightness: An image displayed on a computer monitor always looks a lot brighter than the same image displayed on a projector. You should aim to make the image look good for the projector. To do this, you not only need to increase the overall brightness but also to exaggerate contrast in your image. If you can't check the image on the room projector, plan on making your image brighter than what looks good on the monitor. And always try to increase contrast.

  Size: The size of the images should be HD540 as before. Be sure to use mentalray. Check for image for aliasing problems. If you see jaggies, you should try going to the render settings, selecting the Quality tab, and increasing the quality parameter. In general, the default parameters in mental ray do a pretty good job.

Suggestions for the scene:

• Materials and Shaders: Include in your scene at least 3 or 4 different objects that in real life have different types of surfaces. For example, a scene of a dinner table might have a wood surface, glassware, plates, silverware, etc. You may use objects you have already created in a previous lab but be certain to include a few new ones as well. Make sure that textures are scaled appropriately, e.g. you don't want a brick wall where each brick is huge. Image textures can be obtained from many places including your own photos or going to Mayang. Procedural textures (e.g. wood) can sometimes be difficult to be made to look realistic without a lot of parameter tweeking.

• Lights: Try to use 3-point lighting. In any case, limit the number of lights, e.g. try not to exceed 3. Lights are important in focusing the viewers eye to what is important. They also help to clarify (or hide) shapes and features of objects. Can you explain the purpose of each of the lights in your scene? Recall that for 3-point lighting, there are key, fill, and rim lights.

• Story: Part of conveying a mood, is telling a story. The image you create is a snapshot out of that story; the snapshot contains elements that hint at what has happened before or what might happen in the future. What story is your scene telling?

• Camera: Where you place your camera dramatically affects the meaning of the scene. Think about the different ways the camera can be used (click here for examples).

• Character: You may use bloke or the simple_human_rig, both of which can be found on cs-render in the folder \IDS252Sp15\IDS252Resources\Rigs. However, don't rely on the characters completely to convey the word you have been assigned. The light and textures must do most of the work.

  bloke	simple_human_rig

• Color: To create color unity, choose the dominent colors based on a chosen color scheme. Keep it simple.

• Composition: When composing your picture, consider design principles. Where is the eye drawn (focal point)? Even though you are aiming for realism, still try to create a sense of cohesion through color, shape, light/dark, etc. Experiment with camera and light placement.

Evaluation

Your work is due on the date at the top of this lab. There is also a link to the evaluation sheet, which will be used during the critique (attendance is important!)

Copy both images over the \IDS252Sp15\Lab3\FinalImages\your_name. It should be clear which is your primary image (i.e. the one based on the word you were given) and which is the contrasting image.

Make sure your project is also on cs-render in the folder \IDS252Sp15\Lab3\MayaProjects\your_name. Your project and scene file should be well organized (objects are named and grouped, unneeded items are deleted, etc). Please delete any image ipr or *.iff files in your project folder. .

---