Maya and After Effects: Product Visualization

Render professional quality product shots in Maya. Learn about shading, lighting, rendering, and compositing for product visualization in Autodesk Maya and Adobe After Effects.

Introduction

• Welcome
• What you need to know
• Using the exercise files

1. Scene Layout

• Setting preferences and interface options
• Importing a CAD model
• Cleaning up the model
• Renaming objects
• Building a hierarchy
• Managing display layers
• Modeling a background cyclorama profile curve
• Extruding a cyclorama surface
• Creating a camera
• Setting aspect ratio and framing the shot

2. Materials

• Image-based lighting with a Skydome map
• Arnold settings for real-time rendering
• Rendering on the GPU
• Applying Arnold Standard Surface materials
• Adjusting material parameters
• Designing metallic materials
• Assigning materials to shape nodes in a hierarchy
• Art directing advanced material parameters
• Projecting UV coordinates
• Mapping with a file texture
• Layering materials with aiLayerShader
• Assigning materials to faces

3. Lighting

• Flood lighting with Arnold area lights
• Directing flood lighting
• Studio lighting with a spot light
• Attenuation over distance with the Decay filter
• Accentuating object edges with rim lights
• Excluding lights and shadows
• Controlling visibility of light shading components
• Setting up file output options for AOVs
• Creating AOVs for render component passes
• Creating light groups
• Rendering components of light groups

4. Rendering and Compositing

• Optimizing Arnold render settings for production
• Choosing After Effects color management settings
• Layering render components
• Adjusting lighting in post-production

5. Special Effects and Animation

• Creating an orthographic camera
• Framing an isometric view
• Rendering a technical illustration
• Adjusting contours
• Adding glow effects

Conclusion

• Next steps