Colour lighting in maya

When the lighting and shadows were at a satisfactory stage, i started playing around with the colours of the lights. What's interesting is that colour can pretty much determine a mood of a scene. So for instance, blue lighting could represent cold and mellow where as a colour like orange could be warm and uplifting.

The process of changing the colours of the lights was easy but what was difficult was getting the right tone of colour and effect from the lights that were already placed in the scene.

Out of all the colour experimentation, blue seems to fit in really well. It just seems more natural looking colour in an office environment where as the other colours look a bit more extravagant. But maybe we need something extravagant since we are not going for a realistic look but more of a stylised feel and image.

More Lighting in maya and colour lighting

The moniter screen in maya needed to be lighted up so when the rigged character facing the computer is looking at it, the glow appears from the moniter and reflects into his face. I just selected the faces of the computer screen of the moniter and then just put a lambert glow texture onto the screen. So it gives the illusion that the moniter is glowing.

I just realised that my interior environments still needs to feel like an office and there are no lights on top of the ceiling. It needs some lights on the ceiling like it has in real offices. Plus i have decided to decrease the area lights down to one since the five i put there originally were not really nessesscary. So i scaled the one area light and filled up the whole room. Plus i put a spot light on top of the blocked out vending in machine down the hallway just to give focus on that character. I kept the volume light where it was.

I created the ceiling lights using some cylinders and then i duplicated a couple of them and spreaded them around on the top. Then i put in a couple of point lights into the cylinders because point lights are good for lighting bulbs and lamps. Plus i put a small area light into the moniter screen where the rigged character is facing just to give it more glow and brightness.

The lights needed some colour so briefly looked into the colour of the lights and just tweaked it to a little bit of blue. I will experiment with colour further on.

The results don't look bad but the intensity of the ceiling lights need to be lowered because its too strong and i always have trouble with that. I need to exeriment with the colours of lights too since that is going to be important giving it a mood and feel.

Further lighting in Maya

I've finally found something that may help my lighting problems in maya, specifically as to why the the scene always brightens too quickly everyhwhere. There is this feature in maya called the relationship editors and what i had to do is go the light section and what i can do now is choose the objects which i want the lights to be projected on and the ones that i do not want the lights to be projected on. This is great as it gives me more flexibility in trying to experiment with my lights and get it right.

The results look decent so far and the shadows are also looking good too. The character seems to be holding up well too.

Continuing lighting experiment

So i have been continuing with the lighting experiments and just recently have decided to download a pre - rigged model and put it in the scene. The reason for this is because i want to see how a potential character may look within the lights i am placing around in the scene.

I had to change up the lights and put in more different variety of lights because the area light was starting to become quite limited. I wasn't getting the right look. The rendered shots always seem to become too bright or too dark.

So i decided to put in a volume light and increase the size of it. The reason for doing that is because the light is being projected inside the volume light and so in order for it to have more of a significant effect in the scene i need to expand it outwards. As for the area lights, i still kept them in the scene but i also increased the size of the area lights and cut it down to 5 lights.

The results are getting better but its still doesn't look quite right to me and i am getting frustrated because all the tinkering and adjusting sometimes feels like it makes it look worse but i'm going to find a solution. The character within the scene also looks over lighted and shadows for some reason look really rough and jagged.

I don't know why the shadows of the character looks a little rough so i need to look into that.

Research on Lighting

As i am continuing with my lighting experiments, i've spent my spare time researching more about lighting. I've come across a few videos on the web about basic principles of lighting and what you have to take into consideration when doing the process of it.

Here are some interesting videos that i found