Lighting Tutorial

Above is the results after a lighting tuturial I had. The tutorial covered realistic lighting and shadows in Maya, through the tutorial I learned about:

-Types of lights in Maya
-Photons in Maya
-Global Illumination
-Final Gather
-Mental Ray

After setting up the scene (Box with a hole in top and a ball in the corner) we first began looking at the various types of lights in Maya.

-Spot Light, projects a cone of light from a point.
-Directional Light, projects a plane of light, only rotation affects this light source.
-Point Light, projects from a point all around it
-Ambient Light, similar to point but will always project everywhere aswell

After playing around with the types of light, we found that quadratic decay provided the most realistic results. Under the mental ray/global illumination options on the light is the option to turn on photons, these are almost like balls projected from the light and bounce around picking up surface colours. By playing with the extremes of the intensity and exponent we gained a better understanding of how these work.

What I found out about lighting was, while technical, it also required a lot of playing around and seeing what worked best, constantly changing lighting and render settings to find out how they effect the results.