Car rendering using Maya and HDR light studio

                            In this post I'm going to show you car rendering and lighting techniques which is very useful for studio background renderings. In here we use special software called HDR Lighting Studio. You can download it by clicking here.

                          Open your scene and put some point lights which is focusing the car. Turn on raytracing shadows. Assign some nice textures to the ground and lower the reflectivity. Open render settings window and choose Render Using as Mental Ray.

                         In here I use following values for point lights.
                            Cone Angle- 45.369
                            Penumbra Angle- 10.000
                            Dropoff- 16.585

                        Go to File->Export All.... Choose File type as mentalRay. As a beginner you can use default settings. Click Export All. Open HDR Lighting Studio. Drag and drop your exported file to LiveLight window of the HDR Lighting Studio.

             
                        Now you can create and place lights of your choice.

                        In here I use four lights.

                       There are many light attributes. Assign suitable values. Turn off BACKGROUND

                                 Click Render button. Save file as EXR. Then go to Maya and open render settings window. Go to Indirect Lighting tab. Create a Image Based Lighting. Choose your EXR file. Turn off Primary Visibility for hiding background image when you are rendering. You can use production settings for mantalray. Go to Quality tab and set Multi pixel filtering type to Mitchell.