Digital Cinematography Exercise: Working with Shaders, Lighting, and Rendering

For this exercise, I had to experiment with materials (shaders), lighting, and rendering within Maya. I chose to create a scene that has the Earth and the Moon in a starry sky. One thing that was really important for me in this exercise was truly experimenting with the different textures within Maya. In order to ensure that this happened, I worked only with the textures in Maya and did not import any from outside sources. The project ultimately became the basis for my final project.

A screenshot of the Earth scene in Maya during production.

The stars in the background were created on a NURBS plane. I assigned a Lambert shader to this NURBS plane. Then, I mapped the Volume Noise texture to the color channel of this Lambert shader. I changed many of the properties of the Volume Noise texture, including the Threshold, Amplitude, Ratio, Frequency Ratio, and Frequency, in order to get the stars to look the way I wanted them to look. The Earth was made from a NURBS sphere and the Moon was made from a Polygon sphere. This was done so that I could get more experience using both NURBS and Polygons. They were both assigned Lambert shaders that had different textures mapped to their color channels. The texture that I used for the Earth was the Stucco texture. The texture that I used for the Moon was the Solid Fractal texture. As with the stars, I changed the various properties of the these textures to get them to look the way I wanted them to look. The scene is lit using a spot light. I changed the color of this spotlight to try to mimic sunlight. I also played around with the Intensity, Decay, Cone Angle, and Penumbra Angle. For this project, I was not trying to realistically portray the way the earth and moon would look or be lit in space. I was just trying to experiment with shaders, lighting, and rendering and do what I thought looked good. A rendered image of the final scene is below.

A rendered image of the final Earth scene.