Last week I downloaded a 30 day trial copy of Maya to try my hand at some 3D modeling and lighting. Since my background is primarily in 2D drafting this was a whole new experience for me. While Vectorworks, my go to drafting program, has a very good 3D component, Maya is a completely different animal.
Maya does not have the precision of Vectorworks. It does not work in a particular scale and does not easily snap objects together. Everything is proportional, scalable, and most important, easily editable. What it lacks in precision it gains in intuitive UI design. The environment is really easy to learn to move around in and begin to manipulate objects. I worked my way through the getting started guide to become familiar with the various elements in the program and then set myself up with a project of my own.
Creating a fantasy world in Maya is easy. The drawing aspect of the program is about as intuitive as a pencil and paper. But I was particularly interested in seeing how the program would hold up as far as recreating realistic lighting conditions. So I took an image of my lighting from a show I did several years ago and began drawing the set and then lighting it. Below are the results.
My recreation in Maya
I downloaded the furniture, person, and gun. Everything else was drawn by me and all the textures I created within Maya. The lamp began as a downloaded object and then was manipulated by me to get it looking close to the one in the drawing. Having done some 3D modeling in Vectorworks I was familiar with the idea of textures and shaders, but had never encountered this program’s way of doing things or the tremendous amount of control it gives the user. Everything is a variable. As a designer, this fine level of control is wonderful.
While the basic drawing aspect is very straight forward, much of the rendering engine was tricky to figure out. The table lamp was challenge #1. Getting the right translucent look took a lot of work. Finding the balance between the light source inside the lampshade and the translucency of the lampshade itself took a lot of investigating. Since Maya gives you control over nearly every aspect of the physics of light it can be daunting for a novice like myself to decide where to begin. Does the light cast shadows? Does it “emit photons?” How many? What color is the light when it bounces off a surface? How much light does a given surface allow to bounce off of it? All of these and more are considerations one must deal with while lighting in a 3D environment.
Challenge #2 was the smoke. Maya creates smoke and haze effects by using what it calls nParticles. These are little spheres emitted from a point which have controllable qualities like color, radiance, opacity, speed, direction, and more. Varying these, and running an animation sequence, allows you to generate fairly realistic smoke effects.
While I clearly have a long way to go in terms of making this image look just like the reference picture, I am quite pleased at what I have been able to accomplish with a week to learn a new piece of software. The experience was quite a bit different than my last attempt at 3D modeling where I was already familiar with the basic software and was just adding complexity. I’ll be excited to see what else I can learn to do with the time remaining on my demo version of Maya.
Hi Lucas
Your first week with Maya and it looks good, the amount to learn on those modelling and rendering packages is seemingly endless. Perhaps that’s one of the attractions to the artist/techie combination found in many LDs.
I have used Maya a little, 3D MAX a lot more. I use it for client mockups as part of the corporate event pitching process, often lighting models produced by the production designer. I find that using a 3d modelling package is much easier in the early stages, akin to lighting a model box with 3 birdies and taking some photos. Using more lighting orienated packages, you get tempted to design the entire rig before it’s even certain you have been awarded the gig. Using more flexible methods, you can create an impression of the vision you have in mind. And as an LD, you know what it can look like, you are just trying to convey that to others.
This is the interesting point for me. Such mockups are always bit of fudge, using the flexibility of the tools and letting physics go hang for the moment. This is the bit that I came to realise pretty early on.
At first, you think that you can model and texture everything as life like as possible, then set the environment and lighting photometrically accurate, before optimising the renderer to perfection to achieve a beautiful photorealistic image. While working in some CGI houses I soon learned that the trick is to do whatever it takes to create the image, which usually means setting the Level Of Detail just good enough, er,bodging the lighting, tweaking in post production etc. Oh, and rendering loads of elements to layers so that they can be adjusted at the compositing stage.
From a lighting point of view, I found that you can spend forever trying to get the lighting solution to produce the kind of indirect light you would expect but it’s actually more flexible if you just add more physically impossible light sources, tweak down shadows and colour them appropriately. To start with, I got too hung up on creating “real life” and expecting the renderer to show it to me.
As I am not modelling these environments to produce photometric data, it makes sense that the image comes first, even though that means pretending that the laws of physics never existed.
Shhh, I won’t tell if you don’t