Welcome

- [Aaron] Hi, I'm Aaron F. Ross, and I'm pleased to welcome you to this course on rendering in Maya with Arnold Version 5. Arnold is the new high end rendering engine in Maya, it's a physically based renderer that makes photorealism easier than ever, while also enabling non-physical artistic effects. We'll see how to apply studio lighting, image based lighting, and physically simulated daylight. The Arnold standard surface is a versatile all purpose physical shader and we'll employ it for a variety of materials.

Other shading effects, such as ambient occlusion and displacement, give us even more creative capabilities. The course concludes with a look at camera and rendering tools to output various types of imagery, such as fish eye distortion, spherical environment panoramas, and animation image sequences. The combination of Maya and Arnold is a powerful one, so let's begin our exploration of Maya rendering with Arnold 5.