In the previous lesson, we signed a piece of the Ghostbuster trap, our first new material and dividing
up these lessons in this way because we can't really evaluate the shader unless we can see it rendered,
because we can't see reflections in the viewport here very accurately.
And so we need to add some lights and we need to add something to reflect off of as well, because if
we just add one light, it will illuminate the object, but there will be no other things around for
it to reflect off of.
So there are a couple new concepts you need to learn as well there.
So there's something called an HDR, a high dynamic range image, usually on a visual effects set.
They take photographs of a mirrorball and it looks something like this.
You may have seen this in behind the scenes footage on Game of Thrones or some movie, something like
that.
But this is what a high dynamic range image is usually created from for visual effects.
So they get accurate reflections because what's what we're going to do in 3-D is actually project this
reflection inward so that the object in the scene will accept these types of reflections that this mirror
chrome ball is receiving as well.
So it might not make a ton of sense, but maybe it will once we get creating it ourselves.
So let's go up here to Arnold and we'll go to lights.
And you need to be in no specific tab.
Arnold Tab is in every one so we can go to Arnold Lights and we can just tear that off for now because
we were going to create another light in a moment.
And in Maya, we actually have the option to create a physical sky.
And what Arnold is trying to do is just make a very generic chrome ball.
So it's going to be a physical sky.
So it's going to be just kind of no texture.
It's going to be colors and will be able to control all of that.
But it's just trying to make it so that you don't have to have an actual image every time you want to
create a sky or a kind of mirror chrome ball to be able to project reflections onto an object.
So let's click physical sky and let's see what kind of render we get just straight out of the box.
So let's go to Arnold Arnold render view.
And when we first opened this, nothing happens and we need to tell it to start.
So let's hit this play button and we'll say initiate that.
That's pretty cool.
We actually can see the difference between the two different materials we've applied already, which
is this default Lambert, which comes with every single piece of geometry that's created in Maya and
then our new Arnold shader, where we can see there's actually reflections happening now and the color
is black and we can see this kind of rim reflection here based off of the physical sky that we created.
So if we were to delete this physical sky, this disappears.
There's no light for it to reflect from.
So let's let's try a different light.
Let's do a directional light.
You can tell from the Arnold Lights tab there is no directional light.
So Arnold uses directional lights, but it's not technically an Arnold, quote unquote light.
So let's go to the rendering tab here and we can select this image here to get a directional light.
So once we click that, we can see we start to get the image back here because we have some light in
our scene.
If we go into the viewport here, we can see we can scale up this light.
We can see we have a selected here.
Let's scale it up.
And scaling it up won't have any effect on its intensity or anything else.
It's just for us to see it a little bit better so we don't see the arrows are pointing in this direction.
So we're actually illuminating the side we can't see right now.
So if we just rotate this around now, we can see this object and you can see we are getting some reflections,
but it's very obviously one directional and it's not as kind of illuminated as you would probably see
in nature as much as we when we had the physical sky.
So.
This is just stuff to play around with that depending on how you want to render this or light it or
use it, you may need to use a combination of these.
We could use a physical light with a directional light.
So let's create a physical sky again.
So now we have kind of this key light and we have a fill light using the Skydome.
And the terms I'm using key and fill are film filming terms.
That is kind of a whole lesson in and of itself regarding cinematography that I won't necessarily get
into now.
But you can definitely look up or I might create a new course later about that kind of thing.
But so basically this is how you create lights.
This is how you start to see final renders.
And what we're seeing here in the Arnold render view is a real time update.
So it's constantly trying to finish out the render based on the settings we have.
So this is just kind of there's a lot going on here.
But I really just wanted to show that you can kind of click a couple of buttons and R to get like a
nice kind of a render.
So the next steps I would take is to finish applying the different types of materials to the object
so I can unsullied this so you can see it here and we can apply this shader to these other objects that
it's related to.
So these are all going to probably have some version of that.
So right now we can just apply that same shader we've already used.
So if we right.
Click and we go down to assign existing material, we can see that this is standard surface is already
created so we can use it again.
And if we were to update any of the settings.
In the standard surface, Ashmead editor like changing the color, it'll change for all of them and
we can see that update in real time.
So what I highly, highly recommend is to get to this stage.
And start to drag these sliders around, because you'll be able to see in real time what each one of
these do, and it'll be much quicker than me going through and explaining what each one does and probably
much more interesting for yourself as well.
So definitely play around with this stuff.
You know, roughness is a big thing that will dictate the type of feel that the material has.
Sub-surface is more for humans.
And so when you have metal in this on at all, you can see how great out.
So as soon as we take the metal this off, it'll come back.
But I wouldn't really get in the subsurface yet.
That's a little more complicated for human characters.
And other than that, I would play with these other ones like transmission.
And again, if we have metal, Anderson, you can't really transmit.
So some of these will become unavailable with metal shaders or if you're trying to get metal.
But I think it's definitely worth trying and going and sliding some things around because that's the
best way to learn.
In addition to kind of the guidance here in these videos to show you which buttons to press to get to
that point.
So in the next lesson, we're going to delve a little deeper and talk a little bit about textures so
that we can kind of get a big picture on textures as well.
Thanks for watching.