Photorealistic Lighting with Maya and Nuke

Demonstrates how to light an object onto a live-action still plate, using Maya, Nuke, and Photoshop.This course demonstrates how to light an object on a live-action still plate, using Maya, Nuke, and Adobe Photoshop. Author Mark Lefitz shows how to capture and use a high dynamic range image (HDRI) as the main light source, as well as how to analyze the plate to determine lighting direction, intensity, reflection, and shadow information. He layers in additional key, fill, and bounce lighting, plus ray-traced shadows, using the mental ray render engine. The course also demonstrates how to render various passes from mental ray to composite the final image in Nuke. The composite is finished off with some motion blur and vignetting in Photoshop. Topics include: Understanding image-based lighting Analyzing and color correcting the background plate Creating a 3D camera to match the plate Lighting with low-quality settings and proxies Setting light samples Setting up render passes Rendering mattes ground shadow, and occlusions passes Adding gamma correction in Nuke Adding the object to the plate and rendering the final composite Retouching the composite using Photoshop