Two Free Tutorials: Car Lighting and MIA Material X Passes

Designed by our expert tutors to help your take your skills to a professional level, these two tutorials tackle complicated industry standard topics head-on.

Tutorial No.1 - Increasing Sampling and Reusing Final Gather Points
Taken from our Advanced Lighting with Maya and Mental Ray course, our Car Lighting tutorial highlights finessing the quality of scene renders. In this video, we delve into the final gather settings in the render globals and look at how caching our final gather into maps allows us to save on render time.

As we work toward a final still image in this tutorial, the Mental Ray attributes for area lights and ambient occlusion are discussed in detail. When complete, you will understand the importance of being able to control a number of related areas when working towards a final image.

Topics covered:

• Sampling and anti aliasing
• Mental Ray area light and their attributes
• Ambient occlusion options
• Final gather and final gather maps

Tutorial No.2 - MIA Material X Passes
Our second tutorial, MIA Material X Passes, is taken from the Advanced Shading with Maya and Mental Ray course as well. This tutorial covers the shader networks of two versions of a final scene. We discuss the individual scenes and explain the reasoning behind node selection in the shader networks and the importance of math, utility and color nodes when building your shaders.

This tutorial uses only the physically accurate Mental Images Architectural (MIA) material in a scene and demonstrates its versatility and accuracy in recreating real life materials. We tweak the final settings plus depth of field and bokeh to add further realism.

Topics covered:

• Utility, math and color nodes
• Shader networks
• MIA material attributes
• Bokeh node

In just under 35 minutes, these two tutorials offer a wealth of information.

Click here to access the tutorials.