We began deep diving into setting up the sphere pass that includes an HDR and spot light, moving from Maya to Nuke. I have not had much practice doing this process so most of what I did the past couple days have been trial and error and getting used to the Maya format. This practice is tedious, but helpful as I am learning Maya control much more as normally would opt to use Houdini. It may seem like simple solutions, but it was a learning process for me and over the weekend I will continue doing this and, if time permits, practice with different plates to make sure I have this part of the process down.
The first thing that I had trouble with was making the light geo dome instead of a skylight. It was my first time doing this so there was quite a bit of trial and error involved. The first issue was making the shader. The correct way I found later was to assign a new material which is the Maya surface shader. After making that shader, under 2D textures there is a file option, if you right click you can change it to create as a projection and then I am able to select my HDR.
The other important thing to add is to make sure the projection type is labeled as ball, this will wrap it around and pinch the HDR in that back. We will orient it correctly in the next steps.
I applied it to the sphere but my other big issue that it was not showing up in the view port. I had tried recreating the sphere and looking at my render settings or made sure visibility was on, but to no avail. I spent a lot of time trying to find the solution to my issue.
After searching for the answer to my question, because I could not complete the next steps without it, I found this button with the checkerboard on it. Once click, it will display the textures on the sphere and the problem was fixed.
The next step is to make sure the pinch is on the back of the object. Especially because it is flipped, that way the lighting is affecting the ball accurately.. To do this simply rotate the texture.
To make sure the HDR is in the correct placement, I had compared my RenderView of the chrome ball to the HDR
The next step was to create a spotlight and rotate it so that it was in the position of the key light. The geo light dome is only acting as a fill light and should not overexpose the scene. The key light made via a spotlight (best solution to use first) will give more control for the shadow. So making sure it is position correctly so it hits the object in the same spot is very important.
Best way to check this was to look at the reflections on the chrome ball and make sure it is aligned with the key light and does not create another highlight on the ball. That is how you will know it is in the correct position.
The other thing is making sure that the primary visibility is off to avoid the geo dome from rendering the texture on the sphere. It should only be emitting light, not be in the render layer. To turn on and off invisibility it will be under the shape attribute under the render stats.
This was another bump in the road was messing with the render layers. I had some trouble understanding what needed to be in that scene in order for it to remember correctly so once again it was a lot of trial and error to make sure all the components needed was in there.
For this project the layers that was have right now as the
1. Ball layer that will only render the ball with the reflection
so within that layer there needed to be:
2. Then you need a shadow layer that I am still having trouble with finding what it need inside
Within that layer it should only render the ball with the lights and that is it.
I had trouble with the ball layer because it would not render with the lights but it had an alpha that was clearly the ball so I knew the ball was present but there something that was not emitting. I found out that the texture was not in the render layer and order for the geo dome to emit light, the texture has to be in that layer. Simply putting it in the ball render layer let that emit light and
The shadow layer is currently giving me problems. So I am going to talk out the thought process here to help me solve it.
So within the shadow render layer it needs to have
The ball that will cast the shadow on the plane, but the primary visibility turned off
the plane with an ai shadow matte that will catch the shadow, this is what we want to render
The lights that will cast the shadow
My next step is to reconstruct it and try to see if that will fix the problem