Lab 3: Lighting and Shading
IDS252: 3D Animation,
Spring 2016
Due Date: Tues, Feb 9, before the beginning of class.
Evaluation Sheet (pdf)
Word Assignments
Due Date: Tues, Feb 9, before the beginning of class.
Evaluation Sheet (pdf)
Word Assignments
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:
WARNING: Lighting and shading are very complicated subjects. You will not be an expert after doing this lab but you should be familiar with the basic concepts. Note, that while the concepts have not changed, Autodesk has made a lot of changes to the interface between 2015 and 2016. Many of these changes are for the better, but it means that tutorials based on Maya 2015 or earlier will not correspond well with the Maya 2016 interface and options. Color Management is one item that has changed significantly. Global illumination settings have also changed, e.g. in the Render Settings. Please keep this in mind if you do tutorials from before 2016. The reason for doing these earlier tutorial is that there are still may concepts that can be learned including concepts not yet covered in the available 2016 tutorials.
The following lessons are not required but are suggested especially if the Autodesk Maya tutorials (next section) are confusing or if you want to go beyound the Autodesk tutorials. Go to the Introduction to Maya 2016 and watch the following. The bolded ones are most important although they are all valuable:
If you want to learn more about Mental Ray, look at Introduction to mental ray in Maya 2015
If you want to learn more about Color Management, look at Linear Workflow Rendering Strategies in Maya
All of the folders and files that you will need for the Maya tutorials in this section are on cs-render in the folder
In Maya, go to Help → Tutorials. Click on the link Getting Started with Maya 2015. Remember, there may be small differences in the interface since these tutorials are for Maya 2015. In the contents listed under Getting Started with Maya, do the following:
In the tutorial section Rendering. Do the following lessons:
In the tutorial section Polygon Texturing, do the following:
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!
Facial expressions are a key way humans express emotion. In this section, you will work with facial controls of rigged characters.
The goal of this portion of the assignment is to use everything you have learned above to convey the meaning of a word you have been given. See Word Assignments.
To help you get started, see if you can answer the following about your word:
You are to create a scene that uses all of above items to capture the meaning of your word. Make use of the entire environment (e.g. show more than just a close-up of the face of your character.) Carefully pick the lights, materials, camera angle & position, and palette (e.g. use some color scheme from Color Scheme Designer).
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 may need to make sure that Color Management is turned on. Or, you may need to increase the overall brightness and 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 and Quality: The size of the images should be HD540 as before. Be sure to use mental ray. Make sure to use Maya's Color Management (ask if you have questions about it or watch the videos on the topic in Digital tutors.). 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. There are a number of other parameters you can play with but it can be confusing as to what to change. You will need to experiment. The digital tutors videos can be very useful. In general, the default parameters in mental ray are a pretty good starting point.
Suggestions for the scene:
Materials and Shaders: Don't let the materials and textures overpower your image. Many beginners often use materials and textures that are too bright, poorly scaled, and distracting. Keep things simple and low key. Image textures can be obtained from many places including your own photos or going to Mayang or textures.com. 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?
Character: You may use Bloke or Moom. However, don't completely rely on the characters to convey the word you have been assigned. The camera, light and textures must also play a significan role.
Color: To create color unity, choose the dominent colors based on a chosen color scheme. If asked, you should be able to say what color scheme you are using and why. 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.
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 your images over the \IDS252Sp16\Lab3\FinalImages\your_name.
Make sure your project is also on cs-render in the folder \IDS252Sp16\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. .
