Shading and Lighting

I found an easier time in this course than past ones, at least in the beginning anyway. I really enjoyed getting to know the lights of mental ray and maya, as well as the powers of intensities and knowing what light relates to certain ambiances.

This was the final pass for our last week, and our job this class was to texture everything on the table (wineglass and bottle, place mat, cheese, knife, cutting board and bread). The hardest part about this class for me was misinterpreting how long render times can be. I had a few 5 A.M. nights.

Final pass for third week. This setup had multiple light sources to set up, and with various lights needing to be linked and unlinked to certain objects, I had some trouble with this one. My favorite parts of this are the eyeglass case and coffee mug. I like how those textures and reflections turned out.

This render is darker than I wanted. I had a lot of problems with the IBL and tweaking its brightness and color gain. I think problems with this ultimately made my scene darker than it should have been. Despite this, I like how this turned out.

The Cornell rabbit. Probably my most adorable project thus far, it was an excellent opportunity to study lighting and light linking. I very much enjoyed this exercise.

I had many late nights this class, as it was difficult to find the time to allow for rendering. I learned that it's much better to use low render settings to get the initial look of the reference, and then do a higher quality render when you think an aspect is finalized.