New! Adv. Lighting & Rendering Courses Mesmer is now offering Advanced Lighting & Rendering / mental ray workshops for both XSI and Maya!
Advanced Lighting & Rendering in XSI / mental ray
Prerequisites: XSI 101 course or equivalent experience.
Certification: Earns certificate of completion from Mesmer.
In this intensive two-day class, lighting takes off from where
traditional CG lighting finishes. New techniques in lighting, including
final gathering, ambient occlusion, global illumination and caustic
light energy will be introduced and explored. We'll create an HDRI
image from a series of simple snapshots and use it for Image Based
Lighting. Next, advanced techniques for applying shader trees to
materials that create additional lighting effects will be explored.
Finally, complex lighting effects will be simplified into lighting and
texture map data with the Render Map command.
This class is designed to elaborate on all of the elements involved in
the complicated process of realistic lighting, and to give students a
sense of confidence in their ability to simulate realistic lighting on
their own.
Topics Covered:
Using Shaders with Lights in the Render tree
Using Light Falloff properly
Understanding Area Lights
Special Shaders for Subsurface Scattering and Chromaticity
Simple Final Gathering Illumination
Understanding Radiance and adjusting relative light values
Simple Ambient Occlusion in the Render Tree
Global Illumination and Light transport
Using Caustics and mapped refraction
Using Global Illumination and Final Gathering together
Simple Image based Lighting
Using High Dynamic Range Images (HDRI) and image based lighting
Pre-lighting with Render Map
Cooking down Textures with Render Map
Advanced Lighting & Rendering in Maya / mental ray
Prerequisites: Learning Maya course or equivalent experience.
Certification: Earns certificate of completion from Mesmer.
In this intensive two-day class, the traditional principles of lighting and their application in 3D are examined. An in-depth discussion of basic features and techniques involved in the rendering process are presented, followed with instruction in the application of the more advanced rendering techniques.
Terms and uses of the associated elements involved in generating color, light and shadow are explained in detail. Each of these topics and more is associated with an exercise to reinforce the lecture and demonstration. The tutorials build off of each other, progressively adding complex rendering elements into the students' repertoire. At the end of each day there is a lab period during which questions and personal work can be evaluated and commented upon by the instructor. This class is designed to elaborate on all of the elements involved in the complicated process of rendering, and to give students a sense of confidence in their ability to simulate realistic lighting on their own.
Topics Covered:
Lighting principles
The render globals menu
Materials and shaders
2d and 3d textures
Texture projection
Directional, Ambient, Area, Spot, Point, and Volumetric Lights
