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Core Concepts  11
The type and number of lights you use in a scene greatly affect not just the look of your
scene, but also the amount of time the scene takes to render. Lighting becomes a careful
dance between pragmatics and results. It’s perhaps the subtlest part of CG to master.
When you gain more experience with lighting, you’ll notice that it affects every part
of your CG creation. Before long, you’ll start modeling differently—that is, modeling
with the final lighting of the scene in mind. Texturing will change when you keep light-
ing techniques in mind. Even your animation and staging will change a bit to take better
advantage of efficient, powerful lighting.
As you’ll learn in Chapter 10, “Maya Lighting,” virtual lights in Maya are similar
to lights used in the real world, from a single point of light, such as a bulb, to directed
beams, such as spotlights.
Rendering
At this stage, your computer takes your scene and makes all the computations it needs to
create raster (bitmapped) images for your movie. Rendering time depends on how much
geometry is used in the scene as well as on the number of lights, the size of your textures,
and the quality and size of your output: the more efficient your scene, the shorter the ren-
dering times.
A lot of people ask how long they should expect their renders to take or how long is
too long for a frame to render. It’s a subjective question with no real answer. Your frames
will take as long as they have to for them to look the way you want. Of course, if you have
tight time or budgetary constraints, you need simple scenes to keep the render resources
and times to a minimum. In production, you’re always short on time, so having the most
efficient pipeline possible will be your savior. If you don’t work efficiently, your producer
or supervisor eventually will tire of hearing, “But I’m still rendering.”
That being said, it’s important to understand how a scene is put together before you
learn to put a scene together efficiently. While you’re learning, use as many lights and as
much geometry as you think you need for your scenes. The more experience you gain, the
more efficient your eye will become.
Core Concepts
CG animation draws from many disciplines. While learning Maya, you’ll work with con-
cepts derived not only from computer graphics, but also from design, film and cinema-
tography, and traditional animation. Here’s a summary of the most important of those
concepts as they apply to Maya.
Computer Graphics Concepts
Knowing a bit about the general terminology and methodology of computer graphics will
help you understand how Maya works. Let’s begin with the crucial distinction between
raster (bitmapped) and vector graphics and how this distinction affects you as a Maya user.
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