In this tutorial you will go through the process of modeling and rendering a Living Room in Autodesk Maya. You will learn to use Mental Ray, along with the new architectural materials, and also create realistic fur, implement studio lighting for nice and soft shadows and highlights, and then execute the final render.
This tutorial is Day 2 in a series – Go to Day 1
Final Effect Preview
Step 1
Go to “Window > Rendering Editors > Hypershade”.
Step 2
Inside the ‘Hypershade’ editor, with “Create mental ray Nodes” active, create a new “mia_material_x”.
Step 3
Open the ‘Attributes’ editor for the “mia_material_x”, and name the material “sofa”. This will make sure your ‘Hypershade’ window stays organized.
Step 4
Under the “Diffuse” section, change the color to a beige tone.
Step 5
Adjust the settings below as shown:
Step 6
Scroll down to the “Bump” section, click on “Overall Bump”, and select the 2D “Mountain” texture.
Step 7
Change the “Bump Depth” value to ’0.001′, and then go to the “Bump Value” settings.
Step 8
Leave the default settings as they are.
Step 9
Check the ‘Hypershade’ editor to make sure everything is correct.
Step 10
Now assign the material you just created to both sofas.
Step 11
Go to “Window > Rendering Editors > Hypershade” to open the ‘Hypershade’ editor.
Step 12
With “Create mental ray Nodes” active, create a new “mia_material_x”.
Step 13
Go to the ‘Attributes’ editor of the new material, name it “Table”, and then change the following options:
Step 14
Now scroll down to the “Refraction” section, and change the following options:
Step 15
Apply the new material to the table.
Step 16
Go to “Window > Rendering Editors > Hypershade”, and open the ‘Hypershade’ editor.
Step 17
With “Create Mental Ray” nodes active, create a new “mia_material_x”.
Step 18
Go to the ‘Attributes’ editor of the new material, name it “Legs”, and select one of the presets named “Chrome”. This will automatically create a chrome material.
Step 19
Apply the chrome material to the legs of the sofas, and also to the vase.
Step 20
Open the “Hypershade” editor.
Step 21
With “Create mental ray Nodes” active, create a new “mia_material_x”.
Step 22
Go to the ‘Attributes’ editor of the material we just created, name it “Table Base”, and add a file texture to the “Diffuse Color” slot.
Step 23
Under ‘File Attributes’, click on the “Image Name” option to browse for a wood texture of your own choice.
Step 24
Apply the new material to the table base, and if you look closely, you will see that you need to adjust the UV mapping.
Step 25
Select the table base, then go to “Create UVs > Spherical Mapping”.
Step 26
The texture should now look much better.
Step 27
Now go to “Create > Polygon Primitives > Sphere” to create some geometry for the carpet.
Step 28
Position the sphere accordingly.
Step 29
Then scale it to an appropriate size.
Step 30
Open the ‘Hypershade’ editor”.
Step 31
With “Create mental ray Nodes” active, create a new “mia_material_x”.
Step 32
Go to the ‘Attributes’ editor of the new material, name it “Carpet”, change the “Diffuse” color to a beige tone, and change the “Reflectivity” to ’0′.
Step 33
Apply the new material to the carpet.
Step 34
Select the carpet object, go to the “Fur” tab, and select the “Sheep” preset.
Step 35
In the ‘Attributes’ editor of the “Fur” you just created, change the “Base” and “Tip” colors to beige.
Step 36
Go to “Create > Lights > Area Light”.
Step 37
Position the new “Area Light”.
Step 38
Duplicate the “Area Light”, and position the copy accordingly.
Step 39
In the ‘Attributes’ editor of both lights, change the “Intensity” to ’0.450′.
Step 40
Scroll down to the “Raytrace Shadow Attributes” section, enable “Use Ray Trace Shadows”, and change the “Shadow Ray” to ’15′. Again, do it for both lights.
Step 41
Position the camera as you see fit.
Step 42
Go to “Window > Rendering Editors > Render Settings”, to open the “Render Settings” window .
Step 43
Inside the “Render Settings” window, change the “Render Using” option to “mental ray”. Then, under the “Quality” tab, change the “Max Sample Level” to “2″, and under the “Multi-pixel Filtering” section, change the “Filter” to “Gauss”. Lastly, under the “Raytracing” section, change the following options:
Step 44
Go to the “Indirect Lighting” tab, and in the “Final Gathering” section, enable “Final Gathering”, change the “Accuracy” to “300″, and adjust the “Point Density” to “0.200″.
Step 45
If you render the scene now, you will see that it still needs more light.
Step 46
Go to “Window > Outliner”, to open the “Outliner” window, and then select your camera.
Step 47
In the ‘Attributes’ editor of the camera, scroll down to the “Environment” section, and change the “Background Color” to grey. This will make all of the surroundings brighter.
Step 48
If you render the scene, you should see that it looks a lot better. The carpet, however, still needs some work.
Step 49
Select the carpet, and go to the ‘Attributes’ editor of the fur. Change the “Density” to “50000″, adjust the “Tip Color” to a whiter beige, and increase the “Length” to “1.200″.
Step 50
If you are still not happy with the carpet at this point, you can try adjusting the “Fur” to your own settings. That’s it! Hope you enjoyed the tutorial!!
Start at the beginning – Go to Day 1
Don’t miss more CG tutorials and guides, published daily – subscribe to Cgtuts+ by RSS.
Enjoyed this Post?
Subscribe to our RSS Feed, Follow us on Twitter or simply recommend us to friends and colleagues!
By Alan Monroig
Join our newsletter!
Create a Tutorial, Get Paid!
Have something to teach the world? Want to earn money doing it? Tutorials, screencasts, and articles published here on Cgtuts+ are largely contributed by readers just like you! We'll pay you great money for good content. Find Out More
Wow! Couldn’t wait for this to come out!
Nice work on the shagpile! Great finished product.
Yep, nice tut, easy to follow and good results. Looking forward for more maya. thanks Alan
Nice!!! Great Tutorial
is there going to be any c4d tutorials anytime soon? these all seem great but it sucks not having any for the program i use… even a web roundup would be extremely helpful
Yes, sorry about the delay, but our regular C4D authors have been held up as of late. There will be a new C4D tut first thing tomorrow morning, and there’s an awesome one lined up for next week too!
a what about the blender tutorials.
Well…one Blender tut posted yesterday (How to Make a Toon Shader in Blender), and there will be another one next week too:)
great one! is really helpful because with snapshots i can understand very fast how to move with settings parameters on MR.
tnx a lot
actually i am tryin’ to learn rhinoceros with vray, i hope to find a little bit of rhinoceros tuts here, tutorials like this one.
cheers
gr8 tutorials thanks
Wow awesome I’m gonna try it right now XD
Nice Tut, here is what I got :
http://arthur-bayard.over-blog.com/article-36907017.html
Thanks from France
Great result, I love the wall and floor textures! Nice Work
Thanks :-)
Please don’t stop making Maya tutorials of that quality !
Thank you very much really it’s very very nice tutorial, I’m waiting another tutorial.
Thank you so much for this tutorial, really it’s very nice tutorial, and I’m waiting for another one.
good job.
Super I love it. thx
Great tutorial only I have limited knowledge of Maya (I am using 2010 and I cannot follow this tutorial because you dont mention how to move and rotate objects with the bend deformers spoiling the object. You dont warn of this so I cannot get out of the problem. Perhaps I need to learn the basics but I thought this was a basic tutorial. I can do this easliy in 3ds max but now want to try in Maya.
GOD bles you dude Gregory Magid FROM ISRAEL
youer realy made one of the best tut’ i have ever seen :) simple to follow and yet much to lurn thenk you agen for yoer wanderful share of knolage.^_^
oh realy r u 3d animator…………..?
Nice tutorial, learned a lot, was practising with renderer :)
Picture attached
Howcome I can’t see the c after rendered. i seee the fur before render but it says , ignored after rendering. what’s happening.,
awesome tutorial
i love it ,,, thx
please tell me how to apply normal map in maya
This is the most simple but complete tutorial on living room I have ever seen on the Internet.
No doubt you have a great talent for teaching.
thanks. (sorry for bad english)
very good ya thanks
fur is not getting rendered
i just made one … and took about 10 hours to render the whole imagem on 1280×720 resolution…
this is normal ? well… my PC sucks too.. P4HT 2.4 – 3GbRAM =/
thanku so much…1st time m so happy with d results..m new to this software and i have learned so much…thanx so much
i cant seem to render the fur
why is that?
hey dude wat’z …that mia_material_x…..n how do i create it….need help..thnx
…seems like some buddy…used v-ray render…..i like it .
Really really really usefull!! thx a lot! Easy, clean n good result :)
did you miss a step or something ?
I’m using maya 9.0 and when I click the mental ray node to create a mia material.. there is no shading group for it in the multilister..
so how can I assign it to anything ?
Great tut! I can’t wait to try it by myself and see the results. Thanks! :)
Wow mate…!! This is an awesome tut…!! I’ve made it and its getting rendered…..!! Can’t wait to see the results….!! Once again, thank you very much….!!
some how i can’t find mia_material_x am using maya 2010, how can i get it?
Great Tutorial. Only problem is I’m using Maya 2010 and when i click render all the objects are sharp not smooth though in the display windows they are smooth. is it different with 2010? there anyway i can smoothen it out?
this are excellent, which give us a lot in formation and all
Awesome guide. Thanks!
Thanks for this great tutorial. You’ve really helped me improve my Maya skills cos I’ve improved quite a lot. Please produce more tutorials cos I really need to brush up my skills especially in areas of texturing and modelling complex characters like the human anatomy.
Thanks from Nigeria :)
Thanks for this great tutorial. Tried it out, here is my result:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/67988435@N04/6714920495/
Not really satisfied with the sofa though :( I’d really like to learn more about texturing and shading, and also, this took so long to render (about 4 hours) on my PC (2.2GHz, 2GB ram, 798MB VGA); I know the video card has nothing to do with render speed, but how can I render faster? I used mental ray rendering, and raytracing shadows but it still took so long to render 1280 x 760.
With love from Nigeria :)
Thanks for this great tutorial!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/67988435@N04/6754294287/
Thanks