Global Illum/Ambient in Maya?

Super

Hey all, I know this is a fairly common thing to ask but I've searched and not come up with much thats helped.

I'm looking for the easiest way to render a model with nice Global Illumination or Ambient Occlusion in Maya (I'm using 7.0). There was some talk of a DirtMap shader in a thread by Daz, but from what I managed to find on it, its pretty hard to grasp. Pulling me hair out over this one, I'd appreciate anything on this.

I can't believe theres not a simple one stop solution for this? Far as I know every other package does this.

Daz

I do recommend getting to grips with Dirtmap as it's very fast to render versus Final Gather. Once you deal with the slightly complex installation it's not at all hard to use. I usually just plug it into the ambient colour channel. It's great for quick turntable renders etc.

However, If youre looking for true GI as opposed to AO, there is a one stop solution to GI rendering in mental ray for Maya of course yes. It's very quick and easy.

Go to image based lighting in your mray render globals, slot a map in there and it creates a skydome node. OR simply make a sphere, reverse the normals and stick a shader on it and use that as a skydome. Turn on Final Gather and raytracing in the mental ray globals and hey presto. Image based lighting. If you're not getting enough light from your image, try slotting it into the ambient or even incandescent slots of the material. Slot an HDR map in there If you want to get really fancy.

Ive found jozvex's lighting tuts to be really easy to follow:

http://www.jozvex.com/tutorials/fg.html

Super

Ah, thanks Daz. That was really helpful. Down to me splicing info from all over the place, I was looking at surface shaders, outvalues and stuff when all I wanted was to plug it into Ambient Colour (the dirtmap, that is).

Blimey, its fast. Very similar results to MRay AO shader (which I now have working too as its the same as the dirtmap), but its so much faster. This has saved me such a headache, thank god for forums. ;p

Raven

Easiest way.. Change to Mental Ray -> Preview Global Illumination

in the viewport go to the Camera Attributes, change the Environment Colour to about .5 Light; and Render.

Instantly you have a GI Scene. Quick, Simple, Effective.
Though I'd suggest reading up more on the site Daz provided, as it goes much further in-depth with Mental Ray.