Maya Lighting Practice

Since I am very new to Maya, I wanting to do some practicing with lighting because I know it can have a very strong effect of the tone and mood of a scene, whether it is soft, harsh or barely there. Therefore I used my model posed in the 'sad' emotion that I did not end up using from the 'Strike A Pose' brief and decided to do some extra experimenting to become more familiar with the software. I also found out that by pressing the '7' key when editing allows you to see how the lighting will look without having to go through the expense of rendering, which I find to be extremely useful! 

From the Strike A Pose brief, I learned that I could change the colour of the lighting in order to enhance the mood of the scene, however I didn't know how intense you could go so I decided to experiment with a more rich colour, like red. I actually love how this turned out, not for this particular scene, but for the future, if I wanted to portray my character as evil or have a cruel narrative, I think this spot lighting in red would actually work perfect.

I then tried to see if it was possible to have more than one light, and it was! Because Hayley and I are thinking of doing a carnival/circus theme to our project I think this will actually be very handy to have on my blog so I can remember to add more spot lights to make it more stage-like.

However I think I will need to alter the intensity of the lights because they have illuminated my model so much so that you cannot see any of his facial expressions.

I then went got rid of one of the spotlights and stuck with one, changing it to the soft yellow colour that works for me and went into the details panel to see if I could change anything else.

I noticed I could soften the edges of the spotlight, as well as make it more narrow and more round. I chose narrow and I feel like it best suits my model now, reflecting it's sad pose. But now that I have had a bit more experimentation in my own time, I think that I have a better direction in how I can make my scenes look with certain intensities and colours to set the mood.