In the visual world of CG, presentation is nearly as important to the final result as the artistic piece being presented. For this reason lighting tools and techniques will always be indispensable assets to your artistic toolset.
In this tutorial you will learn how to setup a basic lighting rig in Maya. Specifically, this tutorial covers Lighting, Cameras, Render Settings, and some basic touch-up techniques in Photoshop. Once you've completed this tutorial, you will have a light rig that you can use to quickly render out professional quality images of your model.
User Comments
( ADD YOURS )Joe June 15th
Nice tutorials, and Maya now. Good to have a variety of tools on this site and its tuts.
( )Shafeek Hamza June 15th
thank you, i was waiting for the maya.
( )Craigsnedeker June 15th
I don’t get what it is. All well I’m not a maya person.
( )Craigsnedeker June 15th
NVM I read the intro XD
( )Tobias June 15th
Thats´s a really great Tutorial .. I adapt it to CINEMA 4D
( )And it works great !!!
w1sh June 15th
Trouble getting people to write tuts? Every 4 days? C’mon… I’m starvin’ here.
Keep trying your hardest guys.
( )Dj June 15th
Wow! Looks like screencasting for the CG type of tut makes it much, much more understandable.
( )Mike Moran June 15th
Great job! Fairly easy to follow even for beginners. This is the kind of stuff no one tells you about that can improve quality quickly. And love the post production tips too! Some post production tuts would be fantastic one CGTuts really gets up and going. Nice job again and thanks!
( )Imran June 15th
Really Amazing I like the whole things including lightings
( )Ross June 15th
Thanks for a Maya tutorial
( )I will follow this later when i have time.
chris June 15th
wow great tutorial on light source and camera setup
thanks alot
( )arpafran June 16th
It’s very fun i love maya!
( )Bakaburra June 16th
Great tutorial! It would be fantastic having the same explanation for C4D users!
Otherwise, I love this new site. well done.
Greetings.
( )Menno June 16th
nice tut! Would love to see more maya tutorials
( )Mimo June 16th
Thats what im talking about a video tut…Keep it up
( )BHO June 16th
Really nice tut… Keep them coming.. !
( )Mike June 16th
It’s a good result..
A suggestion: I realize it’s not realistic to know the settings when creating on the fly, but the author should have cut it together so that it looked like he knew what setting to use for everything. Then, instead of tweaking every setting in a already long tutorial, he could explain the differences between what happens when you put the setting higher and lower and move on to the next step more smoothly.
( )jdmaxwell June 16th
Very nice tut! Render and lighting is a tricky art. This is gonna help tremendously Thanks!
( )Leviathan June 16th
Very Nice Tut!!!
( )Hope more like this are comin’
Specially for maya
Chau
Leo Shastri June 16th
Nice Tutorial
( )mike June 16th
why are my comments always rejected?
( )Ross June 16th
I have followed the tutorial and for the next video tutorial i suggest you dont use shortcuts. It took me ages to find the button to get to the same tool or menu that you were using.
Also next can you started to make modeling tutorials?
( )Ross June 16th
Also next can you start** to make modeling tutorials? + Please
( )John June 30th
I’m with this guy… You used a lot of shortcuts and it took me a lot of time to go find out how you did what you did, often having to dig into other tutorials online for that information. What could have been said in 2 seconds during the tutorial took me a good 5 minutes each time instead.
( )rajkamal sharma June 17th
hi.. when i rednrer my file , i found some error in my final reviewe..pls solov it
( )Spiralboy June 18th
much more easy to use is zdepth from maya as photoshop layer mask, disable mask and use lens blur filter, select “layer mask” as source, it’s easy to use and more accurate and independent from your blurring skills
( )sagameou June 20th
this is good job
( )erick June 22nd
i`ve been waiting for high quality maya tutorials like this one. is so nice to learn new techniques for this amazing software. thanks and keep up the good job
( )A June 23rd
not to offend anyone..but if the result, is the rendering showed on the post…
( )i wouldn’t bother watching this tutorial..
maybe the next one
sorry
John doe June 28th
It waould be nice if you could view this on a mobile device
( )Oliver June 28th
Great tut, I really enjoyed it and could follow it as a complete novice.
There were just a couple of things that weren’t quite right about your lights. The colour of light is normally based on temperature. Tungsten has a lower colour temp and is a red/orange, then as lights get more powerful they become more blue, this includes daylight [except when you are talking about sunset/rise but that is to do with the atmosphere]. Florescent lights are green in nature, but nowadays are either balanced to either tungsten [32k] or daylight [56k]. White light is just somewhere in the middle of tungsten and daylight.
Also, the ‘rim light’ you kept on talking about is just called a ‘back light’; rim lighting is just a style of photography.
Sorry to be so pedantic, but I thought this info might help you out.
( )Robin July 17th
Useful tutorial…I will adapt it for 3ds Max though…
Thanks a lot!
( )jukjakjenes September 22nd
LOL! i had fun reading the comments. nice tut though. haha
( )AzteKpr1de October 12th
Great tutorial, thanks!
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