Maya
3D Environment Lighting is our new 70-page tutorial series, where over the course of six chapters we detail techniques on lighting an environment under a number of different conditions. Each chapter covers a step-by-step guide to setting up lights, aimed at portraying the scene in a specific manner.

The various chapters are tailored to specific software packages, and each aims to show a comprehensive and effective way of lighting an interior of a ship that includes both natural and artificial light. These include a sunny afternoon, sunset, moonlight, electric light, candlelight and finally a submerged submarine light. The schedule is as follows:

Chapter 01:
Sunny Afternoon This six-part tutorial series discusses possibly the most challenging kind of 3D environment: interiors! In this first instalment we will create a sunny afternoon lighting scenario for a ship’s cabin.

Chapter 02:
Twilight In this second chapter we will use Mental Ray for Maya for this challenging interior illumination, so all you need for this is to get your CPU at operating temperature and the basic Maya scene of our ship’s interior (download can be found inside this tutorial – simply click on the Free Resources logo!).

Chapter 03:
Moonlight In this third part of the series for Autodesk Maya we will discuss a very interesting lighting situation: natural moonlight. So let’s wait for full moon and a cloudless sky, and then we can turn off the lights and get started!

Chapter 04:
Electrical Following on from our last tutorial on natural moonlight, we’ll discuss a very “CGI-traditional” style of illumination in this instalment: electrical lighting. Although this kind of light is considered “artificial”, we will learn later on that it has a very natural background (as long as we stay with a tungsten light, which we propose to do in this tutorial).

Chapter 05:
Candlelight In the fifth part of the series we discuss the behaviour of electric light bulbs; however the result will be considerably different to the previous chapter, so let’s turn off the lamps, fetch the matches and get our candlelight tutorial started!

Chapter 06:
Underwater In this final chapter our ship has sunk! The ship’s body is below the waterline and filled with seawater. To believably illustrate this situation is the challenge for this instalment. We will create eerie, or unfamiliar, uncommon lighting to support the feeling of being in a different world.

Environment Lighting Designed & Modelled by Richard Tilbury
Tutorial by Florian Wild