Renderman for Maya and GI
Posted: April 22, 2010 at 4:14 am
So I’ve been tinkering with RFM for a while. Everyone always says use an environment light to do your GI. Like an idiot - I never understood how to get it to do what I wanted…which is not simulate the whole freaking thing for me! I’m a lighting artist - I hate when the computer takes all the control away from me. So I finally figured out how to make a sweet GI pass where the environment light does NOT contribute to the solution - it’s just the vehicle for calculation. The steps are as follows:
1. Create an Environment light.
2. Set Environment Color to black (this essentially turns the light off).
3. Turn shadowing to colorbleeding
4. Click the button to the right of Bake Shadowing. in your rmanRenderRadiosityPass create a new camera. Point this camera at the area of the scene you want GI to be in.
5. I turn off “Contribute Radiosity” in the environment light just for good measure.
6. Make sure raytracing is off. Why? Because YOU DONT NEED IT! Yeah PRMan Rocks.
7. Render. You now have GI.
By the by - if you want to only use certain lights for your GI solution - click the button to the right of “Light Set” in your rmanRenderRadiosityPass. This creates a light set in your outliner that you can drop lights into. Lights in this set will be the only ones used for creating your GI solution.
It’s taken me a long time to figure this out but I am much happier for it.