Maya 360 Look Development Light Cage 1002

From £9.99

In modern VFX filmaking and game asset creation, an actor or prop is usually scanned in a light cage that allows the onset team to capture photogrammetry, texture and look dev reference. The resulting photography is invaluable in helping you see how the material (whether this be skin, metal or anything else) responds to light.

This light rig is primarily for the head of a character/creature but you can also set up your own cameras for any other region. The scene file comes with 156 animated lights arranged in a spherical formation to illuminate the subject. You can tweak the lights as you see fit (change exposure, temperature, etc.), and also re-animate the timing of the lights to suit your requirements.

Trailer

Overview

The CAVE team feel humbled to see master character artist Sefkhi Ibrahim using the CAVE Academy 360 Look Development Light Cage for his recent portrait of Robin Williams.

This digital light cage allows an asset to be dropped into the setup and lets you assess how the materials respond to light. Please note, this light stage is not based off any real-world light cage.

All example renders have been rendered with 1AA sample – so extremely low. More high res renders coming soon 😉

The Setup

The setup has been created in Maya 2020 with Arnold MtoA 4.1.0 and Arnold Core 6.1.0.0. However, with a bit of tweaking, you can get it going in any version of Maya/Arnold or in any other application (Houdini, Clarisse, Katana, Unreal, Unitey, etc.). An alembic and an FBX file of the geometry has been included to allow you to easily do this.

The set includes:

  • A light cage model created with basic geometry
  • Animated lights (scrub through the timeline to see the animation)
  • File Format: mb, ma (2020+), abc, fbx

The light/animation sequence is as follows:

  • Frame 0 is a blast from all lights (I tend not to render this frame out)
  • Frames 1 – 12 has the camera spin around the asset (think of this as having 12 cameras around the light cage)
  • Frames 13 – 32 is the look development lighting sequence
  • Frames 33 – 188 are the individual lights being fired one at a time.

A little tip – you could also take the setup further by mapping HDRI images to the area lights in the scene.

Many thanks to Andrea Panenero for modelling the light cage, to Jonathan Reilly for the Iron Man, Arnold, Thanos and Oni (WIP) models, and to Christopher Antoniou for the CAVE base mesh model.

License

For all licences, you may remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, but you cannot resell or share the assets.

Personal

Our personal license allows you to use this on your personal projects and non-commercial projects. You may not create training content that you intend to sell or make available via platforms such as YouTube, Patreon, Vimeo, etc. using this license.

Commercial Single Project

This license allows you to use the product for a single project only. If your studio has numerous sites, you may also use the product across all sites (for example, London, Montreal, LA, etc). However, if you are a studio that comprises of a number of different companies (for example, VFX Global > Pixel Crunchers, VFX Global > Pixel Converters), then you will need a licence per individual company.

Commercial Perpetual

This license allows you to use the product across all your projects and across all sites. However, similar to the Single Project license, if you are a studio that comprises of a number of different companies (for example, VFX Global > Pixel Crunchers, VFX Global > Pixel Converters), then you will need a licence per individual company.

Academic

If you are an academic institute (university, school, training centre, etc.) looking to provide this product to multiple students, please get in touch to discuss our academic license.

Additional information

License

Personal, Commercial Single Project, Commercial Perpetual