What you'll learn

The difference in a good render and a great one often can be tied directly to the indirect lighting you've applied to your scene. Final Gather is one method for creating indirect lighting when rendering with mental ray in Maya that can produce some highly realistic results. This Maya tutorial will start out by breaking down Final Gather so you know exactly how it is working behind the scenes. From here we'll dive in deeper and begin to learn how we can start tailoring Final Gather to provide the best possible indirect illumination for our scene in an efficient manner. We'll cover things like how to adjust the density and distribution of Final Gather points as well as the rays they emit. Next we'll learn how to save and reuse Final Gather point data from one render to the next. This course will even cover how to make sure that your Final Gather results are able to penetrate transparent surfaces. After completing this Maya training, you'll have an excellent grasp on Final Gather so you can start using it more efficiently to create truly beautiful indirect lighting results in your own renders. Software required: Maya 2015.