Lighting Timmys Gift.

Hi i have been looking into the best method of producing some kind of fog in Maya. There is a way to do it at the render, but this is very general and does not look that good. It also is only available in Maya's own renderer.(Environment fog).


The alternative (or the one i am using) is to use a spotlight and a Mib shader. I also used a ramp linked to the colour of the fog to increase the feel of ‘drop-off’. There is a lot of methods of control, but the only way you can be sure that the change to the fog had any effect (at 640x480 for the sake of a quicker render) is to constantly render out your work and save incrementally. When doing this at home each full render takes 20 minutes but if i just render a section it does not take so long.

This is a shot of just the light coming in from the left; without the light for the characters. The blue spot in the middle is the size of the area i ended up rendering to speed things up. 

This is the same shot with the characters lit from one side. It is still a bit bright. By playing around with the penumbra and the drop-off the edge of  the light is feathered and soft. (sounds like some kind of nest!)