Negitive lights act like black holes my ASS!

Okay, so now i'm getting deeper into the lighting now that I'm mostly happy with the geometry. So far I've found that spotlights are like the Swiss army knife of lighting. they can do freaking everything! I have also run into my first hurdle. I'm trying to make the areas in the wall indents darker but some of the spotlight light gets in there. so i figure " OH! perfect time to try out using negative lights. They suck light into them."... yeah... NO! after rendering like 20 times i finally figured out they don't suck in like they REVERSE light! So areas that have light on them get dark and areas that don't get lighter. Negitive lights are still helpful but this puts a cramp in my plands a bit. I may wish to not use a negitive volume light but an area light instead. Hmm... a little tricky.

OH! ad I'm lighting things a little to dark. I had to seriously crunch the levels on these images for them to show up proper.

Lastly... I rediscovered Maya Vector render! I just did a render of it for shits a nd giggles.

Oh my god! It's Baby's first Mental Ray image! AWW!

So I just started using mental ray last night and... wow... I mean WOW! not only is it way easier then I thought it would be it really does make your images look way freaking smexy! The hardest thing for me to do last night was to actually turn it on in Maya. It's a plug-in you have to set on in the plug in manager called "Mayatomr" or something like that.

So, above are the images I made. the first is just the first image i made just to get the mental ray ambient occlusion shader to work. the second is that shader applied to the hallway i posted earlier. and the third is a composit of the one over the other adding much more detail in cracks and such. I'm really jazzed! i can wait to try some sub surface scattering!

small pic update

Just a small update for myself. I raised the ceiling a bit and added some little details. I'm pretty happy with this overall setup so I think I'll just move onto lighting it.

Back from the grave!

well, well, I'm back. and using my Blog again. Why? because I need to document my work again. Lately I've been so sick of being stuck in low poly at work for the past 3 years that I really, REALLY, had to do something to sharpen my mind again. So I'm making this sewer tunnel as a warm up to other things. I'm trying out a slightly different system for this one then I normally do. Usually I model, texture, then light. Now I'm modeling, lighting (with bump maps), THEN texturing. The reason I'm trying it this way is that normally i go back and forth between lighting and texturing because the texture is affected by the light and the light affects the texture making the whole process long winded (at least for me anyway.) By lighting the image first I can direct the viewer to what I want before I add a drop of color. I guess this is just the CG way of doing what a oil painter would do. Working in monochrome then using those values to choose your colors. So far I'm happy.

Also, Doing this project has reminded me I need way more refence photos. Using google image search just ain't cutting it anymore. I need to invest in a good digital camera.