Maya "Clay Lighting" {Area Lighting}
This is pretty much a direct copy/paste from a post I made back in 2005 at Gearbox. I cleaned it up a bit though.
Those of you people who run Maya and are envious of all those people in Max who do clay rendering as such:
Here's a simple and easy way to work around it for non-enclosed models (inside of a house will not work) -- you NEED Mental Ray {It comes with every copy of Maya I believe}:
1) Surround your model and camera in a very large mesh that is all white and has a pure white ambient colour {you can adjust the strength as required}. This will be your area light. For guns, vehicles, and simple models -- a sphere is easy and works perfectly. If you're indoors it'll be harder and you may need to play with raytracing a bit... or having a giant hemisphere behind the camera or something.
2) Take your model and give it the default Lambert shader, or a similar shader that's just colour... no crazy shaders or anything.
3) Pop into MentalRay's render options, open "final gather" menu, then check "final gather". Default settings work.
4) Adjust your other AA and such settings as you like, then render... it takes a VERY long time comparitive, especially since it needs to calculate radiosity beforehand.
Note: Antialiasing in Mental Ray is *exponential*. 2 is actually ~4x Antialiasing. 4 is actually ~16x antialiasing. 8 is like 256x Antialiasing. I found that out the hard way when I forced it to 32 and it crashed... trying to calculate 4-billion-times antialiasing
Enjoy.
Credit to www.simplymaya.com
You're essentially getting closer to Global Illumination... light's no longer coming from discrete points... they're coming from large areas.
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