Maya® Studio Projects Texturing and Lighting

Project: Switching to mental ray

At this stage, all the surfaces of the scene have been textured (minus the background plane). However, the shadow quality remains fairly poor. The depth map shadow of the Key light creates artifacts across the face. These appear as dark vertical bands above and below the eyes (see Figure 3.31 earlier in this chapter) and the right side of the pendant (see Figure 3.21 earlier in this chapter). Small surfaces, such as the Stud or Lip_Ring, fail to produce distinct shadows. Although you can adjust each shadow-casting light's Bias attribute to reduce the artifacts, high Bias values will further erode the edges to the shadows.

Figure 3.39: (Left) Textured face without bump map. (Right) Face with bump map. A sample ...