Customer Reviews

Lighting & Rendering in Maya: Lights and Shadows [Interactive DVD]

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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!

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

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.

So, I initially regretted buying this in the interim between ordering it and receiving it. I asked myself how I could justify spending $60 on a dvd tutorial, when, let's face it, there are so many freely available tutorials on the web. Not to mention the relative ease of downloading illegal torrents (which is the moral equivalent of punching little babies in the throat and I would never, ever even consider it; even if a scofflaw held a gun to my grandmother and told me to torrent High School Musical. Although maybe that has more to do with my feelings towards High School Musical. And the fact that my grandmother is already dead. We're talking about a weird scofflaw here).

So I got it in the mail, popped it in, and all I can say is: brilliant. This is a fantastic lecture and miles beyond some kid cobbling together 'tuts in his basement. This is truly a "classroom on a disc" and you are paying for Jeremy Birn's extensive knowledge of real-world maya lighting in a production pipeline. Scratch that. Despite it specifically targeting maya and mental ray, I was pleasantly surprised that this DVD also taught me a fair amount of real world lighting for photography and film, with incredibly clear and precise demonstrations (some even filmed in live action. Sorry Jeremy but I think your career is destined to remain an off-camera one). And I consider myself a professional photographer, so this is not just entry-level information.

The videos are exceptionally paced and edited (with some minor audio issues, such as some VO that was clearly recorded later in a different room, but I'm just picky), incredibly easy to follow, and the files included on disc give you true insight to anything you can't figure out on your own. I learned many many workflow improvements that are going to literally save me hours of needless, frustrating tweaking. This DVD is worth it for the "tips and tricks" section by itself, let alone the 17 other great lessons. An absolute must-buy for anyone interested in lighting in 3D. Birn is a master.

Hi, im happy because i received the product before i espected. This cd includes very important information and i recommend it.
thanks.

This book was required in one of my lighting classes. and honestly this book is great if you want to understand why you light things a cretin way. it does go into some detail on how to light objects but there really are no tutorials or anything like that.