Using HDR Images for 3D Lighting in Maya
This tutorial is a guide to using HDR panoramic images for lighting with Maya and mental ray. Software Required: Maya 2012, Nuke 6.3v1, Photoshop CS5, PTGui v9.0.
What you'll learn
This tutorial is a guide to using HDR panoramic images for lighting with Maya and mental ray. Throughout the tutorial, we'll cover all of the hidden details that are needed to use HDR imagery for lighting in Maya. We'll start with physically based lighting, world scene scale, color management, proper render preview and verification of valid floating point linear color images. Once the rules for using HDR images are clearly laid out, we will take a look at how you can create your own HDR images at home using a DSLR camera, tripod, nodal head and software. Lastly, we'll go over examples of using and editing these images for a variety of indoor and outdoor lighting situations as well as covering light extraction and making HDR looks from an HDR photo of a light. Software Required: Maya 2012, Nuke 6.3v1, Photoshop CS5, PTGui v9.0.
Table of contents
- What Is a High Dynamic Range Image (HDRI)? 12m
- Physically Correct Lighting 11m
- Linear Color Space Workflow with Textures and Physical Sky 17m
- Looking at Image Based Lighting (IBL) 17m
- Using an Example sIBL for Outdoor Lighting 10m
- Creating Your Own HDR Images with a DSLR Camera 10m
- Stitching and Merging Images with PTGui 13m
- Building a Virtual Set in Maya 36m
- Simulating Movie Lighting by Using HDR Light Textures as Cookies 19m
About the author
Clearly the Visual Effects lifestyle has been a lifesaver for Jon Tojek. “Why is this, you may ask?” After years of hard work to earn a bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering at UW Madison, his lack of passion for designing CPU’s was replaced with a long rewarding career of filmmaking, teaching, and creating visual effects for Hollywood films and commercials. Starting in the late 90’s demoing Alias Power Animator, he worked for SGI during the birth of Maya, helping west coast film clients in... more