Title: FXPHD – MYA226 Look Development using Maya and Arnold

Info:
This course, from professor and VFX artist Charles Chorein dives into methods for look development using Maya and Arnold.

Charles Chorein is a Lead LookDev/Lighting at MPC with 10 yearsof experience. He has been working in London since 2009 and has achieved various movies such as The Hobbit, Prometheus ,The Hunger Games 2, Superman: man of steel, Harry Potter 7, Pirate ofthe Caribbean 4, Despicable Me and recently Terminator Gensys. He is currently involved in the next The Jungle Book from Disney.

Class 1: For starting, we will explore the asset in Maya and set up everything to get ready. We will go through different technical checks to be sure the asset is ready for lookDev.
Class 2: Before we start on a lookDev, we need to put our character on a layout and see the direction of the lighting and the camera point of view. We will explore the different issues we get from a shooting with a real camera with the distortion and the sensor and convert them into the CG world.
Class 3: The HDRI will be our starting point to setup our lighting in Maya. We will see how to calibrate it for our needs. We will use Nuke for adjust the map.
Class 4: Now we have a balanced HDRI, we start to add some extra lights to integrate our character in the background. At the end we will have a nice lightRig with our character integrated with a grey shader.
Class 5: We now have a lightRig setup on a grey shader, so now we will focus on the different shader which we assign per different materials. We will do a pre-shading of all our objects in the scene to give the intention of the materials.
Class 6: We set up all the textures with the shader we set up last week. We will see how the texture can have a huge impact on our lights and shaders and how to balance everything. We will see how to add better texture detail and titles maps in Photoshop for the cape.

Class 7: For the face, the SSS shader will be covered and we show how we can adjust it in our scene.
Class 8: We have finally everything in place in Maya/Arnold, we adjust the lighting, texture and shader to improve and balance everything.
Class 9: Now we’ve got our beauty render, we need to prepare everything for the compositing. We will cover how the setup the render layer in Maya and the different AOV’s we will need in Nuke for improve the CG.
Class 10: We work Nuke to see how to use the different AOV’s and passes rendered in Arnold, how to use the ZDepth and and adjust the lighting in Nuke.