This course, from professor and CG Supervisor Charles Chorein, covers Arnold in Maya and works to demystify the principle concepts in lighting to create a photorealistic image.
Charles Chorein is a CG supervisor at Dneg London with 12 years of experience. He has been working in London since 2009 and has worked on movies such as
. For the last four years he has been working on TV and episodics, having recently finished Dark Crystal for Netflix. He is currently involved in more projects for Netflix coming early next year.
Class Listing
Class 1: Principles
Examining every single light and explaining principals. Analysis of reference images to understand how light works in real life and in the basic in lights: keyLight, fillLight and rimLight.
Class 2: Diving in
With an understanding of lighting terminology, we analyze more reference images in order to fully understand the vocabulary. Basic scene setup and application of an aiSurfaceSharder.
Class 3: AreaLights
AreaLights are powerful in Arnold and we spend to explore and understand all parameters in order to master it and replicate photorealistic lighting.
Class 4: Still Life
Creation of a scene with a CG apple, matching an image reference. How to apply diffuse, specular, and displacement textures and how to convert our texture to a .tx file with the tx manager.
Class 5: Noise, Part 1
Creating lighting based on a reference image is always an excellent exercise to train your eye in practice and see issues like CG noise base of our render engine. Removing noise could be a long render process without NVIDIA’s OptiX, so we'll see how the GPU can remove some noise on the fly for free.
Class 6: Noise, Part 2
Generation of denoise AOV's and working remove noise with Arnold's Denoiser as a post process.
Class 7: More Matching
More lighting matching and using the light manager to manage all lights.
Class 8: Cryptomatte
How to install, generate AOV’s from Arnold and use Cryptomatte in Nuke.
Class 9: Textures
Based on materials from another course which uses Substance, we use the maps to connect all components in our aiSurfaceShader with an image based lighting HDRI.
Class 10: Gorilla Scene
Using everything learned we light our final asset, a gorilla bust and then do a quick slap comp in Nuke and see how we can easily improve the image with some ZDefocus and sharpening.