------------------------------------------------------------------------- This should be a good supplement to the lecture/demonstration notes that you took during today's (Monday, September 29th) class. As you review today's class notes, add some ideas from this web page to your own lecture and class notes to further develop your mastery of Maya. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2008 10:47:07 -0500 (CDT) From: Mark Jacobson To: 810-088-11-fall@uni.edu Subject: Create > Lights > Spotlight for Luxo Lamp and Rendering... Hello Maya students, Now you are ready to do the Luxo Lamp exercise. At the end of the exercise, it states: --- Some Lighting Create > Lights > Spot Light Translate it to within the cone Rotate it so it is pointing in the same direction as the cone Make the spotlight a child of the cone Wherever you aim the cone, the spotlight will now go with it. http://3dtutorials.michaelorourke.com/tutorials/Mod/More/HiersMoreLamp5.html is linked to from: http://www.cs.uni.edu/~jacobson/maya/w5/class14.html http://www.cs.uni.edu/~jacobson/maya/lights/lights1.html is linked to from: http://www.cs.uni.edu/~jacobson/maya/info.html It is MUCH EASIER to get the Spot Light positioned in the Nurbs Cone if you do that at the very beginning, right after positioning the Cone. The Cone will have TranslateX = 0 and TranslateZ = 0 and only TranslateY will be different, will be a positive number. When you create the Spot Light, you can simply move the Spot Light with the translateY manipulator until its in place inside of the Cone. Then, you do the 5 parenting operations to create the hierarchy for the Luxo Lamp. 1. nurbsSphere1 becomes parent of polyCylinder1 2. polyCylinder1 becomes parent of polyCylinder2 3. polyCylinder2 becomes parent of polyCylinder3 4. polyCylinder3 becomes parent of nurbsCone1 5. nurbsCone1 becomes parent of spotLight1 Now, because the ancestor of all the children and grandchildren is an object that has been scaled differently, you need to do the following, with the Nurbs Sphere node selected: Edit menu > Freeze Transformations This changes all of the objects so they have 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 as the values for their TRANSFORM node, i.e. they are TranslateX = TranslateY = TranslateZ = 0 0 0 0 RotateX = RotateY = RotateZ = 0 0 0 0 ScaleX = ScaleY = ScaleZ = 1 1 1 1 This is called the identity matrix... Problem: If a parent node has a non-uniform scale transformation on it, any rotations on the children or grandchildren or descendants of that parent will SKEW and will DISTORT the children. Solution: Freeze Transformations To see the effects of your Spot Light, you need to do one of two things: 1. In the Panel menu, choose Use All Lights from the Lighting menu. The default is Use Default Lighting. -------- The 5 Panel Menus View Shading Lighting Renderer Panels -------- Use Default Lighting * Use All Lights 2. In the 7th group on the Status Line, there are four icons. The 2nd icon is the Render the Current Frame (Maya Software) command. When you do this, it will render the active scene window and show it however you have it Tumbled and Tracked and Dollied. Note: Switch to the Rendering menu set. A P S D R The Rendering menu set is the R in APSDR - Animation Polygons Surfaces Dynamics Rendering - - - - - After the FEMCDW six standard, fixed menus, you will see: Lighting/Shading Texturing Render Toon Paint Effects ---------------- --------- ------ ---- ------------- Render Current Frame The Render menu > Render Current Frame command does the same thing as the 2nd button in the 7th group on the Status Line. Your book, on page 38, names this 7th group the "Render Controls". --------------- Its description of the 2nd icon is: Name Description ------------------- -------------------------------------------- Render Current View Renders the active viewport at the current frame to the Render View window Mark ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://3dtutorials.michaelorourke.com/tutorials/Mod/More/HiersMoreLamp5.html is linked to from: http://www.cs.uni.edu/~jacobson/maya/w5/class14.html http://www.cs.uni.edu/~jacobson/maya/lights/lights1.html is linked to from: http://www.cs.uni.edu/~jacobson/maya/info.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------------