Maya Lighting

Lighting a Scene 101
Lighting
As you can see the lighting in the picture on the left isn't that great, but with a bit of know how we can make it look like the the one on the right will nice shady shadows and a natural sunny look.

Render Settings
1. First we need to tweak our Render Settings to get the best out of the lighting. Make sure you are rendering in Mental Ray, I find this is the best for all renders. Just look at the the picture below and follow the changes.

Shadows

When the render setting are sorted we need to start the lighting. The best light for the job would be the Directional Light.

1. You can find it in Create-lights-Directional light.

2. Once you have the light angle it at your model how you want it.

3. Now to get shadows click Raytrace Shadows Attriutes.

This is the half way point we have shadows and a light source all. The next step is to add a background light.

Lighting

The modal now needs a little more light to help light the scene.

So click on the camera your using to render. go to Environment and pull the slider up a little, depending on how u want the scene to look.

If you want to, you could change the colour to add a different style.

If the renders look something like the image below your doing it right.

To make the light a look more realistic add a light yellow and dark blue. Also tweak the Raytrace Shadow Attribute to soften the shadow cast.

 And that's it, hopefully this was helpful.