Maya Rendering Guides

Create the Dome Light

The next step is to create a dome light to imitate the scattering light from the sky. Dome light consists of 17 spot lights in the shape of a dome. Each one casts slightly bluish light and casts shadow.

1. Create a spot light and name it domeLight01. Press the t key to activate the Manipulator tool. Move the light in the positive Z axis until Z axis translation is about 50 units. Press the w key to activate the Move tool. Press the insert key to activate the edit pivot mode. Hold the x key to use grid snap and move the light's pivot to the global center (0,0,0). The top view makes this easier to see. Press insert again to exit pivot mode.
2. In the Attribute Editor for the domeLight01 spot light, change the Color attribute to be slightly blue, the Intensity attribute to 0.08, and turn on Raytrace Shadows. Choose Edit | Duplicate Special and set Rotate X to -30 and Number of Copies to 6. Geometry Type should be Copy and Group Under should be set to Parent. Click the Duplicate button. This creates the basis for the dome light.
3. Select the six lights at the bottom; don't select the topmost light or the key light. Choose Edit | Duplicate Special again, and this time choose 0 for Rotate X, 45 for Rotate Y, and 3 for Number of Copies; the rest should be the same. Click Duplicate. This completes the dome-shaped light group consisting of 25 lights. We don't need the eight bottommost lights (lights at the ground plane level), so delete them.
4. In the Outliner, select all the domeLights and choose Edit | Group. Name the group domeLightGroup. Rotate the domeLightGroup group 20 degrees in the Y axis, so the lights don't exactly line up with the environment. Attributes of these lights can be quickly accessed and edited by choosing all the dome lights in the Outliner and choosing Window | General Editors | Attribute Spread Sheet. Test render to see how these lights will give more realistic treatment to the scene. It takes much longer time to render as well.
5. The last thing to add are lights pointing up from the bottom to imitate light bouncing back from the ground. Select the domeLightGroup group, choose Edit | Duplicate Special, and set Rotation Y to 0 and Number of Copies to 1. Click Duplicate and change Rotate X of the newly created group to -180. It should now flip to the bottom so that the lights are pointing up. Rename the new group domeLightGroup_ground.
6. Select all the lights in domeLightGroup_ground and, using Attribute Spread Sheet, change the color of light to a slightly reddish color. An easy way to do this is to select one of the lights and open the Attribute Editor to change color interactively and note the RGB or HSV color values. Then, select all of the lights, open the Attribute Spread Sheet, and copy the same RGB value into the RGB values for all of the lights. While you are in Attribute Spread Sheet, turn off Use Ray Trace Shadow; we don't want any shadow from these lights. Also change Intensity to 0.03. Test render the scene again. It should look like the following image:

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