Rendering with Modeling Viewport Lighting

[ariel]

I've noticed that to show models, one of the best lighting setups is the actual viewport lightin that is default in Maya. Now, I have 2 questions

1) How can I recreate this setup with actual lights so that my software render is almost identical to the viewport lighting. (I want to do it in software, not hardware render buffer)

2) Is there any way at all to change the default Maya lighting (the one you see when you press 5) without adding any lights to my scene?

Thanks for any tips on this.

[joojaa]

Delete all lights and maya renders using the defult light...

Not that i know of no.

Anyway you should find a deecent 3 point lightning works even better go to http://cade.scope.edu/courseware/notes/lighting/index.htmlhttp://cade.scope.edu/courseware/notes/lighting/index.html. Anyway good lghtning is the key to good images. You could study some real lighning trics and then remember that cg light in general wont bounce without some GI features (wich in many cases is overkill)

[ariel]

Thanks Joojaa. I think I didn't express clearly what i wanted. There is quite a difference between the Viewport lighting and the default lighting you get when you render a scene with no lights. The default viewport lighting is camera dependant and "rotates" as you rotate the perspective camera, so no matter where you look your models from, they are always going to be lit. If you render with no lights you won't get this. I've thought about 2 directional lights pointing each other for this effect, but still is not 100% the same as the default viewport lighting. Using 3 point lighing or GI is something completely different from what i'm looking for. In many cases I like much more how a complex model looks under the regular Maya vewport lights than the way it does with GI or other complex lighting. Thanks anyway for the nice link. It is very informative.

[joojaa]

Well you can allways recreate the lights an bind them to the camera. I think it actualy uses two distant lightsources so use directional ligths... Sometmies maya recreates theese lighs but not allways i dont know why or how tough!

Anyway the effect is going to be a bit different because the ogl view uses different materials that the hw renderer (goraud instead of phong etc etc.)