This tutorial is about Physical Sun and Sky in Maya. It's the closest thing we've got to the 'make cool' button.
All right, here's my scene in Maya. The first thing I'll do is go to my Render Settings, so I'll click my Render Settings button.
I do want to double check that Mental Ray is turned on, and then go to the Indirect Lighting tab, and Physical Sun and Sky is right up at the top.
I'll click the create button.
And two new things pop up. There's a physical sky node, and also a sun direction node.
Let's talk about sun direction first. It's actually a directional light. I can select it in my outliner or my scene.
I like to scale it up to make it easier to find, for when I want to start interacting with it.
But hey, the second we hit the 'create' button, Phys. Sun Sky is active, so we rerender and see what we've got. Our scene is much brighter.
In fact, it's too bright. It's washed out. We need to make some adjustments. would a need to make some adjustments.
So go to the viewport 'View' menu, and 'Select Camera'. Then we scroll down to our Mental Ray tab.
We're looking for a 'Lens Shader'. Physical Sun and Sky plugs in an exposure node to our camera's lens shader slot.
We always want to keep that in mind. I'll click on the little black arrow next to it, and make some changes to it.
I need to adjust my exposure parameters, to take my scene, which is currently washed out, to a better level of contrast.
But the parameters in here... don't exactly spell out what they do.
We start with the 'Gain' parameter. Gain is just the overall brightness. If I lower the gain, my scene gets darker, if I raise the gain, it gets brighter.
So by setting it to 0.125, I see that I get a scene that is a little less washed out.
But generally,
we don't want to just linearly adjust the Gain down or up. We want to adjust other parameters, like Pedestal, to increase constrast.
Pedestal affects the darks, the blacks, in our scene. By lowering the Pedestal, I can make my blacks much
much darker, so I'm creating a crushed black look. And this is a good start!
My scene is more contrasty... maybe a little made a little bit too contrasty. So I'll raise the Pedestal a little bit,
bring some light back into those shadows, and then turn my attention back to the Gain. I'll raise Gain slightly to the 0.15
that will brighten the overall scene as a whole, but because of my darker blacks, I still maintain a good level of contrast.
So a quick review: I lowered the Gain to darken the scene as a whole, I lowered the Pedestal to make my shadows a bit darker and add contrast,
Now, let's turn our attention back to the Sun Direction light.
I'm going to rotate that, and by rotating it, that changes the position of the sun in the sky. This is pretty cool, it's a really easy way
to change the look of our scene. We can see I rotated my Sun Direction, and the sun is now lower in the sky. I get longer shadows.
But what is really cool, Physical Sun and Sky creates 'time of day' effects, based on the position of our sun in the sky.
So I've created a sunset effect here, we see that the colors are more orange, the way that they would be during sunset. And if I look at the sky,
We see that the sky that's been created, has a sunset look. The light is getting more orange as it gets closer to the horizon.
So this is the really cool part of Physical Sun and Sky. But let's check out some other attributes.
If I go into my Render Settings, and go to the Physical Sun and Sky, I can I just click that black arrow to open up my physical sky parameters.
I'll rotate my sun direction back to an afternoon position and re-render
Now, let's look at these parameters. Some, like the Horizon Height, are pretty self explanatory, that just controls the gray line back there.
Red Blue Shift is where I like to start. Red Blue Shift controls the warmness or coolness of my scene.
It's on a scale from -1 being blue, to 1 being red.
It would be really useful to have a slider here, but NOOOOOOOoooo, Maya loves it when we have to do things the hard way.
So if I adjust my scene to a -1 on Red Blue Shift, I see that my entire scene is very blue; and way too blue.
Probably only appropriate for something like an underwater scene. Generally we're only going to use values like -0.3 or -0.2.
And when I re-render, now I get a much cooler scene, suitable maybe for a late afternoon look.
If I switch in the other direction, +0.2 or +0.3, I get a much warmer look, something appropriate for a much hotter day or a desert environment.
Red Blue Shift allows us to very quickly control the overall look of our entire scene.
Next up is Haze, which creates 'overcast'. Haze is on a scale of 0 to 10, if we put it up to 10, Haze covers the sky.
We see our shadows get a little bit more diffused. And by default, it's a little bit too yellow.
We can use some Blue Shift with Haze to create a more natural overcast look.
Haze does max out at 10, but if I set it to 100...
Anyway, other effects: how about Saturation? We set this down to zero, we can remove saturation in our scene.
And we get a black and white image that doesn't look like natural sunlight,
but it does look like a cool artistic effect that we could use to create, for example,
a really depressing city or alien planet or something like that.
Let's tilt our sun direction back to more of a sunset / sunrise position. We can actually see the sun up in the sky,
and that's where these sun parameters come in, the Sun Disk Scale or Sun Disk Intensity.
I'll adjust those, and I'll increase the size of the sun and intensity, so that I get a huge sun in the sky.
Which is appropriate if, you know, the sun has just gone super nova, or we're on an alien planet.
But take note that that doesn't affect the intensity of the light at all. That's where Multiplier comes in.
By raising my Multiplier and adding some Red Shift, I can make my scene brighter, and make it look like there's intense sunlight in the scene.
So play around with Physical Sun and Sky, because cool things happen regardless of what you do.
Now, one more thing. Let's go into our Render Settings, and go to the Quality tab and drag that slider way up.
When we do this, it's going to increase the overall quality of our scene. That gets rid of a lot of the noisiness that we see in parts of our render.
All right, that's it for Physical Sun and Sky, now you probably have an idea of why I call it the 'Make Cool' button. Basically you turn it on,
and it makes your scene look better. Hopefully you found this video helpful, click subscribe or give me a shout out in the comments if you did!