ABSTRACT
283WE’VE COVERED A LOT about animating in Maya throughout this book, but to close it out let’s learn some basic lighting and rendering. Since this book is by an animator for animators, we’re not talking about feature film quality lighting; that’s something covered by many great lighting artists in their respective tomes. What we want to gain is some skill in simple lighting techniques that will add a nice bit of polish to our animations. These are very simple and easy tricks that give good results, and look much nicer than simple playblasts for showing your work. When your animation is done, the cheats you learn here will give you a soft, clean, simple look for a demo reel or portfolio that looks nice and doesn’t distract from the animation. All the renders you see in this book have been done using the techniques from this chapter.
