Maya outdoor lighting help !

Ron.S

Hey guys nice to meet you all long time viewer, first time poster :P, Anyways I'm doing a 30 second animation for my class, I decided to animate it in Maya 2011, ran into the problem with setting up a nice outdoor lighting, If i were using max I have a lot of ideas to light my scene in maya but im just diving back into maya and totally lost. Any suggestions?

Emil Mujanovic

Moved this to Technical Talk.

Warheart

If you're planning to render with mental ray you can get convincing outdoor lighting set up pretty quickly/simply by using the Physical Sun and Sky stuff. This tutorial covers a lot of the tricks/gotchas of getting it set up: http://wiki.bk.tudelft.nl/toi-pedia/MR_Using_the_Physical_Sun_and_Sky_environment

It totally depends on how you want your renders to look whether that will be an appropriate setup for you though (e.g. if you want a cartoony outdoor look then using that is probably going to be overkill).

If you describe what you would want to set up if you were in Max then someone can probably help guide you on how to create a similar effect in Maya.

Ron.S

Well I wanted to do a FF IX based theme, Vivi the blackmage is going to be my guy I wish to animate, I have most my assets built and textured.

But I'm not that great of a texture artist and want to learn how to texture it how the artist at blizzard did their game " WoW " its the look I think that would fit with this animation.

So basically what I wish to do for my class is just to animate the scene in maya for my project, and than bring the scene to life in the UDK, I've got most my assets in game working ( Trees,rocks,plants, ) but I really wish to get a more cartoonish style to it.

So im not that great with maya and was wondering how I could get great lighting to bring it to life, I started to apply the physical sun and sky, thanks for the link. I will me posting some renders.



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UDK Screen Capture



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Im new to the UDK so everything looks pretty bad :P, But I want to go back and retexture and model all my assets, which were the trees + the tree house looking thing. Want to get a really good cartoonish style. Tips anc crits are welcome !

Warheart

I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to do exactly. You know you're not going to be able to bring the lighting directly in from Maya to UDK?

I'm confused about what you're asking now. Do you want help getting lighting set up in Maya for rendering, or in UDK?