Variations in Lighting and Render Passes
They say the devil is in the details, and ain’t that the truth. We recently did an assignment for my Maya class where we took a model from our final projects and used different lighting techniques and types of render passes for identical scenes. It’s pretty clear here that one can achieve some really different looks by knowing what they are doing in their render settings. Better still is that some of these can be combined later in After Effects to create a combination of looks as desired.
This first one is just standard raytracing.
This one is just with final gather, using a pumped up surface shader for a light, like the movie theater example.
Still in the Mental Ray renderer, this one uses both the final gathering shader applied to a plane, and also a standard spot light.
In this one, everything is on.
This is using the Maya Software renderer. As you can see, I’ve lost the soft effect entirely from the modeling.
And lastly the ambient occlusion pass.
Pretty neat!