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LinkedIn Learning

Maya: Rendering in Arnold 6

via LinkedIn Learning

Overview

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

Syllabus

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

Taught by

Aaron F. Ross

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