IBL Test

Meanwhile... I start out by understanding how Image Based Lighting works. I went to watch a tutorial and test it out.

IBL Tutorial Maya - IMAGE BASED LIGHTING EASY SETUP

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyWEKvIUImU

In render, under presets, load production.

Just with the IBL, on Final Gathering and Ambient Occlusion

For the material settings, for the left one, I pushed the colour to black, push up the specular shading to 1, switch on refractions, as for the one on the right the pecular roll off is around 0.462. Added directional light, only a test shot and I didn't try to match the lighting to the surroundings yet. 

Removed the ground plane and selected the IBL and enabled emit lights under light emission. 

Rendered out, took a few seconds and checking the alpha channel

Over here I switched off the primary visibility under render stats.

Pumped the specular colour up.

This is the test shot I have tried today. I understood how IBL roughly works. Went to the library to borrow references/materials to understand more about texturing, lighting and rendering. Borrowed the Gnomon workshop on Texturing - hypershade and materials and Rendering - shadows by Darrin Krumweide to get more information about texturing and rendering if possible. And got some books by Lee Lanier. The texturing, lighting and rendering and also the advanced texturing, lighting and rendering... So far, I have watched the texturing - hypershade and materials and learnt slightly more stuff, like importing and exporting networks. 

I want to try understanding render passes and how it works, and if possible, do realistic texturing and lighting. I'm quite scared about it though, like the rendering time and stuff but I guess i should just give it a try.

 I went to do some online research too. I'm putting the links here for me to refer to.

http://www.cgchannel.com/2010/07/tutorial-multipass-rendering-in-maya-and-mental-ray/

http://www.3dtotal.com/index_tutorial_detailed.php?id=1094&catDisplay=1&roPos=1&page=1#.U_iCbvmSx8E