kanooshka

Hey everyone!

I know it's been awhile since I've posted anything but here it goes!

I'm sure everyone else is like me and is always looking to speed up their test render times, and because of that I've put together a global quality UI. This UI gives you one simple control to scale all of your scene's quality parameters while storing your high quality attributes for returning back to the highest quality. Currently this tool only supports Renderman 4.0 but if there's enough interest, I can make it compatible with other renderers. 

You can get the script here: http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/script/global-render-quality-control-ui

Here's the current build's description:
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I'd like to introduce Light Master V0.1a. The idea of Light Master is to focus on simplifying the workflow of lighting in Maya by having useful tools and settings all in one place. Currently the tool's main task is soloing lights. Soloing lights is essential when lighting but, unfortunately it can be a tedious and troublesome task. With this tool it is now a one click solution to specify one or more light(s) to hide or show.

For those who made it to 3DStimulus Day, thanks for coming! Also thanks to Gael McGill, Alex Schwartz, Yuris Mangold and Chad Moore for volunteering their time to present. Finally, thanks to GET for putting the event together. For those who weren't able to make it to 3DStimulus day you missed some great presentations and networking, hope you can all come to the next event!

Also, for those interested here are the slides from my presentation. Hopefully they'll be useful. I look forward to delving further into this topic at a later event.

Lighting and Materials : Concepts and Theory (PDF)

One is by far the ugliest number when it comes to working with color. A lot of people find it easier to work with HSV values as opposed to RGB values, mostly because it's much more intuitive. I don't blame them, I use mostly HSV myself. However, there are a few pitfalls that come with that territory. So when working with HSV make sure to check your RGB values for these issues.

Let's start by taking a basic image with 3 spheres The top left is pure red RGB(1,0,0), top right green RGB(0,1,0) and bottom blue RGB(0,0,1) as well as a plane underneath with a gray material RGB(0.5,0.5,0.5), for showing the light color. Keep in mind that this is a very drastic situation. As this entry will hopefully teach you, you almost never want RGB values of either 0 or 1.

For this first image we have a white light for a starting point.

If we look at the RGB values for this white light we have (1,1,1) which is good because they're not zero. Now lets try a different scenario.

This image has a pure yellow light in it with RGB(1,1,0)

Now it may seem obvious not to use a light of this color because there is a value of 0 for blue. But this same color in the HSV scale looks deceiving. The saturation in the HSV scale for this color is 1. No zeros, so there should be no issues you may think. However, a saturation of 1 means one or two RGB values equal 0. In the case depicted above this blue is that zero.

So maybe the problem lies in the materials. If we desaturated the materials there shouldn't be a problem....

This is what happens with a purely yellow light when its intensity is extremely high. Why doesn't it resolve to white?

Well, one must ask themselves what colors are required to make white, and they are red, green and blue. No matter how bright this light gets even with a white material on the sphere there will not be any blue present to create white.

The solution? Stay away from saturation values of 1! My recommendations for HSV are to keep the Saturation values below 0.8 and keep the Value between the range of 0.2 and 0.8. As for RGB 0.2 - 0.8 is a good range. Of course there are always exceptions to the rule but this is good for a general guideline.

Finally here are renders with saturation reduced from 1 to 0.8.