Product Details

• Actors: Jeremy Birn
• Directors: Jeremy Birn
• Format: Full Screen
• Region: All Regions
• Number of discs: 1
• Studio: 3dRender.com
• DVD Release Date: November 3, 2008
• Run Time: 197 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B001JBT1EA
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #45,526 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great resource for CGArtists!, December 5, 2008

By 

Daniel Konieczka (MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lighting & Rendering in Maya: Lights and Shadows [Interactive DVD] (Interactive DVD)

I recently had the privilege of viewing the tutorial DVD Lighting & Rendering in Maya: Lights and Shadows by Jeremy Birn and thought I would help the CG Community by writing this review. For those of you who don't know, Jeremy Birn is a Lighting TD from Pixar Animation Studios who has worked on films such as The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Wall-E and their new upcoming feature Up. He brings his professional knowledge in tools and techniques to these tutorial videos.

Lighting serves as the backbone of any great render and this DVD shows how to achieve high quality renderings while not sacrificing render time in a production environment. The tutorials begin with the basics of lighting in Maya proceeding through each light type and their relevant properties. Along the way universal topics such as color,intensity,diffuse, specular, etc.. are explained. One topic which is extensively covered is shadows. Jeremy Birn explains situations where an artist may choose raytraced shadows vs. depth-mapped shadows and vice versa. All these topics are thoroughly covered in separate videos at about 10 minutes apiece filled with explanations, tips and tricks that can be useful in many applications.

Along the way there are a few exercises such as matching the lighting of an orange, lighting a simple room, and in the end, all of these tools come together into a final lighting tutorial showing how to light a kitchen scene, all Maya scene files are included both starting and finished.

The skills learned throughout can be applied in the simplest to the most complex of scenes and therefore I would recommend this DVD to Maya beginners, intermediates and even advanced users who feel they would like to improve their skills. Though this DVD does not cover subjects such as Global Illumination or Final Gather it teaches fast rendering indirect lighting techniques while having high quality results.

I also recommend this for users who use other software packages but only for those who hold some knowledge of their software package's lighting tools. In this case the DVD would be more of a tool for lighting principles and techniques as opposed to learning your software packages tools. NOTE: All scene files on DVD are for Maya ONLY!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very essential !, December 28, 2008

By 

Million (CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lighting & Rendering in Maya: Lights and Shadows [Interactive DVD] (Interactive DVD)

Heres why:
1.Its highly explanatory & starts from basic concepts
2.Scene files provided which is a BIG plus
3.No rushing, easy and each step shown in detail
4.Absolutely simplistic approach, so that anyone can actually create the same results
5.Lots of variety of subjects (& scene files)
6.Pdf files which is a great addition
7.Cool tips & tricks
8.Very honest mentoring from the Guru himself
9.Just the lighting of the kitchen itself is INVALUABLE

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars an essential resource, February 16, 2010

By 

Richard W. Edwards (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Lighting & Rendering in Maya: Lights and Shadows [Interactive DVD] (Interactive DVD)

This is a project to reproduce the classic text in video form. I've incorporated the lighting demos into my class lectures and found them useful on the job as well. Although it's not the entire text, the author plans to expand the series and I for one can't wait for the next DVD.