I also handled the majority of the lighting for our environment. I went back and through between a few different HDRI maps to use as the basis for our lighting but ultimately liked this one from PolyHaven the most.
https://polyhaven.com/a/autumn_ground
I took the HDRI map into Photoshop and gave it a gaussian blur as I wanted to scene to have a more ambient look. This ended up not really influencing the final render setup as I felt the final scene looked better with the HDRI camera visibility set to 0. I decreased the HDRI’s intensity as I wanted to achieve a night time atmosphere for the scene and wanted Maya/Arnold’s other lights to do the rest of the work. This was the environment with just the lighting from the HDRI:
The scene with the HDRI image visible to the camera + an area light acting as a rim/moon light for the scene.
I turned of the HDRI image visibility again, this is a similar set up as the previous image, HDRI light + one blue area light. When we had our lighting class a few weeks ago, I really liked the effect/realism adding an aiAtmosphericVolume has on the render so that has been added here:
I created some meshes for the candle flames + turned them into Arnold mesh lights (I realised later on when I was doing render tests that these would be a huge issue, although I sorta still like the light effect they had on the candles + surrounding objects)
Added in the remaining BG environment objects I originally had in the blockout + the final candle light.
I added in area lights directly in front of the candles to enhance their effect so they would add some blue and orange rim light to the twisted trees in the foreground + the other objects surrounding the shrine:
I was also regularly tweaking the material values of the grass blades + hill to get them looking closer to how I wanted. When I was adding lights, I often needed to adjust their colour, roughness and specular values to look less reflective but also not too dark or too bright.
The lighting was pretty much done so I moved onto actually animating my three scenes. Once I finished the character animation for my shots, I adjusted + added more lights for the two characters I had in my scene, which was my own character (the helmet sprite) rig + Philip’s (mushroom sprite) rig. It was pretty much the same approach to how I did the environment lighting, adding area lights, adjusting the character’s materials, etc. I also used the lighting relationship editor a lot to fix how things were looking. From the environment lights only the HDRI map was affecting the two characters + their weapons. The new lights (mostly area lights) I put in specifically for the characters were affecting them the most.
I wasn’t happy with the transparent material on the characters because of its refraction distorting the objects behind it. I wasn’t sure how to fix it since none of the settings in the transmission tab of the aiStandardSurface material were doing anything so I watched this video on Youtube and tried lowering the IOR value from the default 1.5 to 0.9 which I think looks a lot better.
I also did a quick render of this shot at 540p to see how things were looking:
Not sure why, but when I did a playblast of the animation it was 6 seconds and the scene played out more slowly. For some reason despite setting the render’s export to 24 fps in After Effects the animation seems a lot faster. Anyway, the render/lighting was looking good but there were these white dots everywhere. I thought this was because it was at 540p but when I rendered out my other shot in 1080p it also had this white dots everywhere, making it kinda distracting.
I researched how to fix these and found out that it was a common issue with these types of renderers and they were called “fireflies”. I tried all of the fixes suggested in this forum thread, reducing the specular in the HDRI + the other lights, changing the indirect value on the lights, changing the clamp value in the render settings but had no luck. https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/maya-shading-lighting-and/arnold-on-maya-2018-small-white-dots-on-render-image/td-p/7533518
I also looked a bit at the arnold documentation but still no luck:
https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5AFMUG/Fireflies+-+Boat+Scene
I then watched this video and tried to troubleshoot where the fireflies were coming from using AOVs but nothing I did there helped either.
I asked Alec for advice and he got me in the right direction towards fixing the issue:
I tried adding a directional light to the scene which I think helped a tiny bit but when I wasn’t making a huge difference I decided to turn off all the lights and turning them all back on again one by one, doing an IPR render each time to see if the fireflies appeared again. All the area lights were rendering ok with no fireflies until I turned on the mesh lights I had used for the candle flames. I finally realised that it was the mesh lights causing the issues I had both with noise, render times and the fireflies. I wanted to see if I could fix the issue and keep the mesh lights but in this reddit post, the better workaround would be to have an emissive material on those objects + using an area light right beside that geometry to achieve a similar result. When I rendered with the new setup it reduced my original render time at 1080p from 13 minutes down to 7.
I cant get rid of the noise from the light mesh . I raised the number of light sampels(8 samples), increased the camera AA, diffuse and specular and ray depth samples and still getting some bad results (I am using arnold). Is there any other way to increase the quality? Thank you!
byu/David_CS invfx
This is pretty much the final light setup, I did a few more tweaks – increasing/decreasing the light samples so I could keep the render setting samples low in order to save on render time. The light setup which has the characters has also been tweaked a bit and this will likely be the final result that I will use to render:
I learned a whole lot about lighting and rendering in Maya and Arnold from this course on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/paths/ulster-university-lighting-and-rendering-in-arnold?shareId=f5a2fc1f-9637-4f97-94af-8d40559eb1d0&accountId=35574164&u=35574164&success=true&authUUID=SeI4YZWmThGNcl80LIv4TA%3D%3D which I think really helped me when I got around to doing the environment and character lighting for this project. I tried out some of the things I learned from this course on a few keyboard renders, at the suggestion of my friend who’s trying to get me into making them. These were super fun and I spent a long time experimenting with arnold render settings and light samples and general light set ups. Deskmat, keycap and board case models were downloaded from this spreadsheet:
