30 days is just enough time to get a basic familiarity with a computer program. Certainly when exploring it in one’s spare time between other projects. I began by working my way through the getting started guide to Maya 2011 and then moved on to my own projects. I knew I wanted to try my hand at some naturalistic lighting but did not have the modeling skills to get the level of detail and control that I would like with a project.
I contacted my friend Deb who used to work with Maya professionally and she offered to build and texture a scene for me. I drew a rough 2D layout in Vectorworks showing the groundplan of the scene I wanted. A street that Ts into another street, brick buildings, windows on the right hand side and a warehouse with steel rollup doors on the left. I wanted streetlights as I knew I would light the scene at night. Basically everything was there to show off different lighting ideas from streetlights to bare bulbs to fluorescent tubes to the headlights of a car.
Below is the opening frame of the animation.
A few seconds in a 1963 Jaguar rounds the corner and drives down the street. The light from the car scrapes against the various walls and textures creating a lovely effect.
It was an interesting experience to manage all the various ways in which light can exist in a 3D world. Obviously there are the rays of light emanating from a source. But it can be decided by the designer if those rays cast shadows or even if they stop when they hit an object. The headlights, streetlights, and lit windows all had an added feature of glow. Just because a light emanates from a source does not inherently mean that source glows, even though it would in the real world.
One of the most interesting aspects of this project for me was dealing with the rate of decay of a light. At one end of the spectrum a light can have no decay meaning its intensity continues unabated over space. Obviously we know from the inverse square law that this is not the case in reality. But in a 3D environment we need to trick the software in order to look real. The light from the sun, for all practical purposes, should have no decay in a digital environment. A fluorescent on the other hand should have a very rapid rate of decay. The sodium vapor of a streetlight, or an incandescent bulb, would land in between these two.
I often find myself, when working on a theatrical production, trying to fake naturalistic lighting conditions. Yet no matter how much it is faked I am still using real lights. As such they behave like real light should behave. In a digital environment like this, one has control over every aspect of physics. As such you can explore what parameters will make the illusion most accurate.
My license with Maya 2011 is up just in time for the new release of Vectorworks 2011 on September 14th. From what I have seen, VW2011 has added some amazing new features to its 3D environment. I look forward to exploring these new features with the 3D knowledge I gained in Maya.
I began working my way through the training manual that came with the program and was given a lot of basic exercises to learn different tools. Basic 3D extrudes, 3D reshaping, curves, and so forth. I was blithely working with these simple shapes when I came to the first big project in the training manual. 
The most complex shape to deal with, far and away, was going to be the iron supports underneath the first landing. Not only is the basic outline a complex shape with various curves and corners, but it is cut out and recessed in multiple places at varying depths. This is also what makes for a very good learning project. There is a single, very difficult, challenge and then the rest of the project is working with rather basic skills in a more complex way than the previous simple shapes exercises.
