Creating Product Shots in Maya

Render product shots in their best light with Maya and After Effects.

Introduction

• Welcome
• Using the exercise files

1. Laying Out the Scene

• Importing a CAD model
• Setting units and grid options
• Moving viewport cameras
• Managing the scene hierarchy
• Creating display layers
• Modeling a tabletop
• Modeling an environment sphere
• Creating a camera
• Framing the shot

2. Studio Lighting

• Creating an ideal diffuse test object
• Enabling mental ray
• Setting up a linear lighting workflow
• Creating area lights
• Building white cards
• Focusing the lights
• Controlling intensity
• Adjusting area-light samples
• Optimizing Final Gathering

3. Shading Models with Materials

• Creating shaders with mia_material_x_passes
• Creating an environment material
• Customizing a chrome material
• Creating a reflective tabletop material
• Mapping reflection and transparency
• Blurring a file map
• Adjusting colors with RemapHSV
• Shading white cards
• Fine-tuning studio lights
• Adding a procedural 3D texture
• Creating a painted metal material
• Customizing a glass material
• Understanding ambient occlusion in mia_material
• Applying ambient occlusion in a shading network

4. Image-Based Lighting

• Understanding image-based lighting
• Adding image-based lighting
• Setting IblShape attributes
• Controlling Light Emission
• Fine-tuning image-based lighting

5. Rendering and Color Correction

• Rendering to high dynamic range
• Defining After Effects color settings
• Color correction in After Effects
• Rendering depth of field with the bokeh lens shader
• Controlling mental ray quality
• Setting up render passes
• Rendering an ambient-occlusion pass
• Layering render passes in After Effects
• Adjusting render passes

Conclusion

• Goodbye