Prior to this task, I had never heard of Arnold and had no idea of how to render in Maya. Over the summer, I had used Blender and rendered a donut, however, Maya was no doubt going to be different in terms of how to render.
The first step was to create some objects that could be rendered. I chose to follow along with the video and create a table, vase and two spheres.
The next step was to add a backdrop. This was new to me and something that I discovered is useful to do to create backgrounds in renders. The curved backdrop in this example creates a nice effect in the final render.
Adding a camera was the next step. The left side of the screen is the camera view and shows what will be seen in the final render. The right side of the screen is just the standard perspective view. Having these two views together makes it easy to adjust the camera’s position quickly and efficiently.
When it came to lighting my object, at first no light showed at all. On the video the intensity was around 1000 and the light looked normal. I checked to see if my settings were the same and they were. For some reason I had to crank the intensity really high (nearly 40,000) to get the same effect as shown in the tutorial.
As you can see, the lighting was way too bright on my first attempt.
Therefore, I kept tweaking it until I was happy with how the 3 point lighting looked in my final render. I like the lighting in this render as there is a strong light from the right, but at the same time the soft light on the left balances things out. There is also a light on the top to brighten up the scene even further.
The next step was to adjust the properties of the materials. I made the vase slightly transparent to give the illusion of it being thick glass. I think this works very well as you can just see the other side of the vase but it isn’t totally transparent.
I also made both spheres metallic. One is turquoise whilst the other is silver. The spheres have different levels of shininess, the one on the right being more shiny. Once again, Arnold captures this with perfect realism.
The final part was changing the colour of the background. I am amazed at how easy it is to make something look realistic using Arnold.
Another thing that impresses me in this final render is the bounce light on the table. The under part of the table is slightly turquoise from the ground.
One negative aspect of Arnold is that if you want a high quality final render without the graininess, you have to crank up a lot of settings. Not only does this increase the render time but it puts a strain on your PC. This means that if you don’t have a particularly powerful PC, you will potentially not be able to get the highest quality render.