Lynda - Photorealistic Lighting with Maya and Nuke

Lynda.com ? Photorealistic Lighting with Maya and Nuke

Author: Mark Lefitz

Subject: 3D + Animation, Rendering, Textures, Materials, Video

Software: Maya 2013, Nuke 6

Level: Intermediate

Duration: 2h 24m

Released: Dec 20, 2012

This course demonstrates how to light an object on a live-action still plate, using Maya, Nuke, and Adobe Photoshop. Author Mark Lefitz shows how to capture and use a high dynamic range image (HDRI) as the main light source, as well as how to analyze the plate to determine lighting direction, intensity, reflection, and shadow information. He layers in additional key, fill, and bounce lighting, plus ray-traced shadows, using the mental ray render engine. The course also demonstrates how to render various passes from mental ray to composite the final image in Nuke. The composite is finished off with some motion blur and vignetting in Photoshop.

Topics include:

Understanding image-based lighting

Analyzing and color correcting the background plate

Creating a 3D camera to match the plate

Lighting with low-quality settings and proxies

Setting light samples

Setting up render passes

Rendering mattes ground shadow, and occlusions passes

Adding gamma correction in Nuke

Adding the object to the plate and rendering the final composite

Retouching the composite using Photoshop

(Thanks to Petshopper)