mental ray Workflows in Maya 2015: Caustics
This mental ray tutorial will go over the process of creating and controlling the emission of caustic photons into our Maya scenes and then rendering them out using mental ray. Software required: Maya 2015.
What you'll learn
This mental ray tutorial will go over the process of creating and controlling the emission of caustic photons into our Maya scenes and then rendering them out using mental ray. Caustic light patterns are a natural occurring phenomenon in the world around us that is often overlooked. These patterns of focused light can add an extra level of realism to your renders so understanding how to create them is important. To start, we'll learn how to control photon emission and photon energy as they enter our scene. From here we'll learn how to control the color of our caustic patterns. When using photons, ray interactions, and photon interactions become critically important. We'll learn what interactions affect our caustic patterns and how to control them. To wrap this mental ray training up, we'll look at saving and reusing a photon map to speed up our render times. Software required: Maya 2015.
Table of contents
- Understanding Caustic Photons in mental ray 6m
- Controlling Caustic Photon Emission and Photon Energy Properties 11m
- Altering Caustic Color Attributes 7m
- Separating Caustic Effects from Direct Illumination 5m
- Using Raytracing Attributes to Correctly Calculate Refractive Surfaces 11m
- Fine-tuning Caustic Attributes in the Render Settings 11m
- Adjusting Raytracing Attributes for Shadows and Reflections 9m
- Using Photon Tracing to Control How Caustics Interact with Transparent Surfaces 10m
- Controlling How Photons Interact with Maya Materials 8m
- Adding Complex Color Variation to Caustic Patterns 6m
- Creating Caustic Effects with mental ray's Architectural Materials 11m
- Saving and Reusing Caustic Photon Maps 7m
- Using the Map Visualizer to View Photons in a Scene 8m
About the author
Eddie began teaching creative professionals over ten years ago for Digital Tutors. In 2014 Digital Tutors was acquired by Pluralsight and he continued his focus on creating high quality training for artists in both the film and games industries. With a background in graphic design and illustration Eddie has always been focused on visual appeal. This can be seen through his courses in which he shares secrets for achieving production level quality for concept art, illustrations, textures, mater... more