Lighting in Maya: Final Gather

Final Gather

A cool trick you can do whilst using Final Gather is the ability to emit light from geometry.
I typically light in this fashion using a Poly Plane, but you can pretty much use anything.

1) Make a Plane, right click on it and Assign Blinn.

2) On said Blinn, set the Incandescence to 1.

3) Make sure you are using Mental Ray, and turn on Final Gather in the Indirect Light portion of the Render Settings.

4) On your Render Options make sure you turn off Enable Default Lighting.

5) Still in Render Settings: Primary Diffuse Scale amplifies light while Global multiplies ALL values on ALL light...so be careful with that.

6) In order to have any kind of specular highlights when lighting with Final Gather, an object must be reflective.

7) To fix sharp reflections, use the Mental Ray Shader MiReflection Blur to soften the reflected images.

8) Take your Accuracy in the Render Stats to abut 4,000.

9) Secondary Diffuse Scale...the higher it is the more color bleed you can achieve!

This Final Gather image took roughly 45 min to render.