Datasheet

16 Chapter 1: Texturing and Lighting a Product, Part 1
Project: Creating Lights and Shadows
After you’ve adjusted the material Color and Transparency attributes, you can begin light-
ing. Although Maya provides a default light when no light nodes are present, the light
quality is not driven by any particular light source. Hence, the default light is not suitable
for judging assigned materials or added textures.
Setting the Key Light
Although you have a fairly wide selection of light types in Maya, we will use an area light
to serve as the key for the headphones scene. The soft quality of the area light makes it
suitable for product lighting. Use the following steps to create and place the light:
1. Choose Create

Lights

Area Light. The new area light is placed at 0, 0, 0. Select the
light and interactively scale it so that it’s 10, 10, 20 units in X, Y, Z. For greater preci-
sion, you can enter values into the Channel Box. Rename the light Key. You can enter
a new name through the top cell of the Channel Box while the light is selected.
2. Position and rotate the light so that it is in front
of and slightly higher than the Render camera
icon (see Figure 1.16). The light should point in
the same direction as the Render camera. The
direction the area light is pointing is indicated by
the “pointer” extending from the light’s center.
Note that the Render camera is animated and
moves in a short arc around the headphones. Use
the Timeline controls to see where the camera
starts and stops.
3. Render a test. To do so, choose Window

Render-
ing Editors

Render View and choose Render

Render

Render from the Render View menu. At
this point, the render settings are set to low qual-
ity. We will raise the quality after we add shadows.
Fine-Tuning Material Attributes
After you’ve set the key light, you can begin to fine-tune additional material attributes. First,
examine the overall brightness of the surfaces in the render. If the surfaces are consistently
too bright or too dark, adjust the Key light’s brightness. To do so, open the light’s Attribute
Editor tab (with the light selected, press Ctrl+A) and change the Intensity attribute value. If
individual surfaces are too bright or too dark, adjust the corresponding material’s Diffuse
attribute. Lower Diffuse values produce darker surfaces. If necessary, further adjust each
material’s Color attribute. For example, in Figure 1.17, the Key light’s intensity is set to 0.4,
while several materials have had their Diffuse and Color values lowered.
Figure 1.16
Scaled and posi-
tioned area light
that will serve as the
key, as seen from
the Top and Front
view panels
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