Fake Rim lighting - Tutorial

[cowsmanaut]

I whipped this together for our students but I thought I'd share it and see if it made a little sense to those I have not shown it to yet. I'm not sure if it stands up on it's own as it assumes a certain level of knowledge about the Maya interface. Specifically that you know what and where the HyperShade is. If you do not, you can find it under windows/rendering editors/Hypershade.

Questions and suggestions are welcome

enjoy.. moo

www.dungeon-master.com/class/fake\_rim/fake\_rim.htm

[joojaa]

Umm im not sure but seems to me that this shader could be optimized radicaly if the ramp shader was thrown out or the picture! Anyway id have to time this offcourse!

[cowsmanaut]

Id be interested in how you think it could be optimised. The only thing I could think of was adding in an operator to alter the hue and brightness of the image to make the highlight layer rather than doing it in Photoshop.

other than that.. it's just two pictures and a rampshader.. how much more simpler can you make it??

moo

[djsmackmackey]

I'm not sure the point of this fake? Wouldn't it be just as easy to actually make a rim light? Just aim the light so that it's creating a rim?

[cowsmanaut]

Well, the requires time and effort trying to get it to perfectly rim the character based on all you rlighting. I often find I need to set up a bunch of lights to get a good rim on the character. What this does is means you don't have to adjust and set up lights doing light linking and such to get a decent rim. You just do this and bingo.. don't ever worry about it again. We do something similar in XSI as well. It works very well and usually looks quite nice.

[deke-kincaid]

I'm not sure the point of this fake? Wouldn't it be just as easy to actually make a rim light? Just aim the light so that it's creating a rim?

I prefer this method too. I just use this rimlight script that Daniel Dawson wrote a few years ago and posted on the listserve. It's just a modified point light with some custome attributes on it. It is much faster to tweak and you don't have to specially change shaders for every scene as your lighting changes. Only trouble is it doesnt work for any postfx(paintfx or fur, it blows out the lighting on them). No biggie because I composite most of those elements in separate passes.

You can find it here:
http://www.highend3d.com/maya/archive/sp.3d?mail\_id=34107
It needs to be modified a tiny bit for maya 5.

[cowsmanaut]

I dunno, perhaps I'm just lazy. However, I've spent my time doing real rim lights and making sure they work exactly how I want on the objects I want. As a result when doing animated scenes I run into points where the lights need to be moved or adjusted to fix some issues.

I find with a fake rim this far.. I only need to set my key and fill lights and never worry again in the scene as the fake rim works on the objects I've set it on without any fiddling.

Also, changing all the shaders in your scene is not what I'm doing.. you only need the rim on a few objects.. Specifically the Characters as the point of a rim is to "pop" them out in the scene set them apart from the back ground and this does that nicely and very easily.

moo