The art of realism

The release of RenderMan for Maya (RfM) marks the first time this powerful, production-hardened rendering technology has been made accessible to the wider Maya user base. RfM couples the power, speed and stability of Pixar's production renderer with the familiar workflow of shading in Maya's Hypershade.

In this tutorial, RenderMan for Maya will be put through its paces in an attempt to shade, light and integrate a sculpture of the Greek Titan Prometheus into a background plate from the British Museum. During this process, we'll explore many of the advanced features that RfM offers: subsurface scattering, ambient occlusion, brickmaps, micropolygon displacements, and secondary outputs. RenderMan for Maya Eval is available here.

First, we'll develop a marble shader that approximates the main surface characteristics of our reference images. It will need to show small divots from the wear of time on the surface of the marble, discolouration from the effects of oxidation, and changes in specularity from polished to rough, unfinished areas. And, of course, no marble shader would be complete without subsurface scattering. Next, we'll analyse and match the lighting set-up in the British Museum. Without the benefit of a HDRI probe to light from directly, we'll have to dissect the lighting environment from reference photos, and a thorough analysis of how sculptures are lit in the museum itself.

Finally, we'll render out a number of secondary outputs (diffuse, specular, occlusion and so on) with RfM, and use them to build up a composite over a background plate from the museum. This step is where the magic and flexibility of secondary outputs pays off, as we layer and correct each output to match the museum plate. As the shading network builds up, refer to the scene files. Each important node will have notes on it to explain its function in the shading network. Also, it's a good idea to have the RfM documentation at the ready, so that some of the concepts touched on can be explored in greater depth.

Click here to download the support files (~79MB)