Advanced Maya Texturing and Lighting- P3: I should stress that I am self-taught. In 1994, I sat down at a spare seat of Alias PowerAnimator and started hacking away. After several years and various trials by fire, 3D became a livelihood, a love, and an obsession. Along the way, I was fortunate enough to work with many talented artists at Buena Vista Visual Effects and Pacific Data Images. In 2000, I switched from PowerAnimator to Maya and have since logged tens of thousands of hours with the subject of this book | In addition you can animate the Color attribute by left-clicking the color swatch choosing a new color from the Color Chooser window right-clicking the color swatch or the word Color in the Attribute Editor tab and choosing Set Key from the shortcut menu. To edit the resulting animation curves select the light and open the Graph Editor choose Window Animation Editors Graph Editor . Intensity Controls the brightness of the light. You can apply a texture to this attribute to vary the intensity across the throw of the light. The texture serves as a multiplier. If Intensity is set to 2 and the texture is 50 percent gray the intensity of the light will only be 1 when it strikes a surface. Illuminates By Default Serves as an on off switch for the light. Emit Diffuse and Emit Specular Determines whether the light will affect the diffuse and specular calculations of a material during a render. Each attribute can be checked off independently. If only Emit Specular is checked the specular highlights will render by themselves however the alpha channel will include the entire surface. Maya lights offer manipulator handles to make the positioning of the light icons easier. You can activate a manipulator by selecting the light and choosing Display Rendering Camera Light Manipulator manipulator name. To hide the manipulator choose it again it from the menu. The following manipulator handles are available for all six lights Cycling Index Displays an upside-down Q-shaped icon that when clicked cycles through all the other available manipulators see Figure . This is perhaps the most efficient way to use the light manipulators. 39 MAYA LIGHT TYPES Figure A spot light s Cycling Index manipulator Center Of Interest Displays a Center Of Interest manipulator and an Origin manipulator see Figure . When the Center Of Interest is translated the light rotates automatically to follow. You can also translate the Origin manipulator and thus move the body of the light. 40 Figure
