From the course: Maya and Arnold: Exterior Lighting and Rendering

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Setting up environmental lighting

Setting up environmental lighting - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Maya and Arnold: Exterior Lighting and Rendering

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Setting up environmental lighting

- [Instructor] Once we have our camera set up, we can start the process of lighting. Now typically, when I light a scene, I start with environmental lighting and this is the overall light in the scene. Usually, it's image-based. So I have, what's called an HDR file, and I'm going to use that. Now an HDR file is essentially a high bit depth file that will give you a better gradation of light and color. Now we do this by creating what's called a Sky dome light. Now I have my Arnold tab here, I'm going to go ahead and select that, go into lights and we're going to create an Arnold Sky dome light. Now when I create this light, you can see it actually comes in a little small. It's supposed to cover the entire scene, so actually I'm going to go to my perspective view here and zoom out just a little bit. And then let's just go ahead and scale that up. So I'm going to keep that Sky dome selected and scale it up, so that it's…

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