Best render settings in Maya?

Proxzee

Hey everyone, I'm preparing my models for an interview and was wondering what's the best way to render in Maya for characters? I like what my models look like with default lighting turned off, is there a way to do this for rendering? Also I've tried AO, but I get an error:
// Error: [MentalRay Baking Setup]: replaceShadingNetworkWithBakedTextures( bakedResult, numErrors, computation, aborted), File: C:\engserv\rbuild\164\client\Maya\src\MentalRay\plugin\ConvertLightmapSetup.C, Line: 980

Toast

"Best render settings" change immensely between different scenes.

I think what your after is a clay type render. Just turn on Final Gather with mental ray in the mental ray tab. Then in the Render Settings, first tab turn off the default lighting. Or use IBL which is a tab on the very bottom of the mental ray tab.

It's probably best, for a character, to do a 3 point lighting setup. Do a Google search on that and you'll find hundreds of tutorials. 3 point lighting is very common on movie sets / tv sets and its tried and true when presenting models.

benclark

I tend to use mentalRay and basic light setups, seems to be work the best when you are dealing with normal maps anyway

I use the production:finetrace preset for mentalray and make sure I change the pixel filtering to Lanczos (in the render globals)

then its just a case of experimenting with your light setup and then tweaking how you want the shadows to look. If you have alphas on your model it requires a few other settings to be checked but theres plenty of threads explaining that already

Proxzee

I was looking for the tutorial for those low poly team fortress 2 models. I thought i saw it on this forum but can't seem to find it. Thanks for the info!