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Use objects as lights

Use objects as lights - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Maya 2018 Essential Training

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Use objects as lights

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- [Instructor] Another great way interesting way to create lights in Arnold is to use an object as a light. This is a great way to create lights that have custom shapes or to do such effects as neon. Here I have a simple Taurus in my scene. Let's go ahead and turn that into a light. If we go into to our Arnold menu, under Lights, we have what's called Mesh Light. I do need to have the Mesh selected when I select this menu option. When I do it goes ahead and kind of makes the object disappear, so we don't see the actual geometry of the object anymore. If we go into the attribute editor, you'll see that things have changed quite a bit. Under the shake node, we have all of our light attributes. It doesn't show up as a official light in the scene. It's actually part of the geometry. We can change geometry into a light by going into that shape node. Let's take a look at how this is rendering. I'm going to position my camera here. Make sure I can see that light. Let's go into Arnold Render…

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