Maya: Rendering in Arnold 6

The Arnold renderer in Maya makes photorealism easier than ever. Learn to light, shade, and render using the powerful tools in Arnold 6.

Introduction

• Rendering in Maya with Arnold 6
• Using the exercise files
• Updating the Arnold plugin

1. Concepts

• Prerequisites: what you need to know
• Introducing Arnold
• Arnold rendering concepts

2. Processing and Interactivity

• Arnold viewport rendering
• Using the Arnold RenderView
• Interacting with the scene in the RenderView
• Analyzing renderings in the RenderView
• Saving RenderView snapshots and files
• Tuning sampling quality
• Controlling global illumination ray depth
• Rendering on the GPU

3. Environment Lighting

• Creating an aiSkyDomeLight
• Image-based lighting with aiSkyDomeLight
• Daylighting with Physical Sky
• Setting color temperature of an environment
• Using multiple skydome lights
• Improving light samples
• Improving skydome interiors with light portals

4. Studio Lighting

• Creating a Maya area light
• Setting area light attributes
• Creating an Arnold disk area light
• Rendering self-illuminated surfaces
• Setting shape node Arnold attributes
• Using area lights for suffuse light through windows
• Control distance intensity with a Light Decay filter
• Creating a directional light
• Art directing sunlight with a directional light
• Adjusting attributes of duplicate spot lights
• Focusing lens radius for a collimated beam

5. Materials and Mapping

• Creating an aiStandardSurface material
• Base color and specular roughness
• Texture mapping with bitmap files
• Rendering metallic surfaces with Metalness
• Masking geometry with an opacity map
• Transparency and refraction with transmission
• Tinting transparency with transmission depth
• Shading with ambient occlusion
• Building an Arnold shading network
• Rendering vertex color with aiUserDataColor

6. Cameras

• Controlling camera exposure
• White balance with camera filtermap
• Lens distortion with fisheye camera
• Rendering a spherical panorama
• Rendering bokeh with depth of field
• Animating focus distance for a rack-focus effect

7. Rendering

• Optimizing render times with adaptive sampling
• Rendering an image sequence
• Test rendering with aiUtility shader
• Smooth mesh subdivision at render time
• Deform a surface with a displacement shader
• Optimizing subdivision in 2D raster space
• Optimizing subdivision with frustum culling
• Atmospheric perspective with aiFog

Conclusion

• Next steps