Lighting Techniques

Below are a couple of images demonstrating what I have learnt in terms of lighting and the use of shadows within Maya using final gather and mental ray. I looked at a useful tutorial on Youtube which shows you how to use a spotlight and use its settings effectively.

Link to online lighting tutorial: - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VUn8xXMSCk

The image above is where I have used a spot light and set the penumbra angle to 20 once more. I also enable the ray-trace shadows option. However with mental ray enabled I can now use the area light attribute. This means that in conjunction with the penumbra angle I can have more control on the drop-off of the shadow, thus making the shadow softer. This is a useful technique for lighting a scene so that the shadows are not so intense. The image above is not exactly perfect as there are noise distortions near the edge of the shadows cast, this can be improved by increasing the Accuracy, Point Density and Point Interpolation attributes in the Final Gather tab within Mental Ray . These shadows are far nicer however as they are softer and more diffused.

The image above shows the use of a spot light with its penumbra angle set to 20 with the use of the ray-trace shadows attribute turned on. As you can see this provided a shadow however the shadow is far too harsh and distracting.