First, open your copy of Maya. Using a blank scene, set your Project Folder and use all default settings. Click Accept.
Now, make sure you have polygons in your shelf and your Menu Drop Down Box. Make a Polygon Plane, this will be the floor for this shot. Scale it to a reasonable size. Press 5 to smooth shade your Plane.
Next make a second polygon, whatever shape you like, I have chosen Sphere. Postion it in the middle of your plane.
Now for this we are gonna use a spot light. The purpose of the spot light it to light an area with a radial or circular, or to draw the viewer to a single area, due to a Spot Light concreting light in one area. To create a Spot Light go to > Create > Lights > Spot Light. You should now make a light at the center of your stage and your Maya would of automatically selected it. As Spot Lights are lights you need to direct and point, in your Maya window click > Panels > Look Through Selected Camera. You should now be viewing your Maya scene thought your Spot Light. Postion the light into place, with the light facing towards the shape your made at a 45 degree angle. With the whole pane in view of your directional light, so the whole stage is lit. ( I have also opened up the attribute editor, make sure to have this open as well.)
You can move the light in Persp view, just my way is my personal preference.
Go back to Persp view and in Maya window click > Lighting > Use All Lights. Then go back to Lighting > Shadows. So your Lighting and Shadows are both turned on.
In the attribute editor, with your Spot Light selected, go down to Shadows. Your first option can let you change the colour of your shadow, you can use this when light is passing through a colour object, or if your using a colour light.
Now you can use two different options for shadows:
First we are gonna look at Depth Map Shadowing. Click the check box and turn on Use Ray Trace Shadows. Go down to resolution and you can change this. The higher it is, the smoother the shadow will come out in your render. So go for the standard of 1024. ( I have increase the size of my shape, just so for purposes of this tutorial you can see the shadow and the different changes a bit more clearly) Time to have a look at how this shadow will render out.
Next open up your Render Settings Window. The icon for this can be found in the top right, it's the clapper board with two dots to the left of it. We are gonna use Mental Ray to render out our scene, Mental Ray takes a bit longer in rendering larger scenes, but it does produce a higher quality.
In the Render Settings Window click the drop down box next to the Render Using and select mental ray. Before we rendering we need to change a few settings, in the common tab go down to Image Size, Presets Drop Down Box: Select HD 1080. Next, select the Quality tab in your window and change Max Sample Level to at least 2. The higher this value, the longer it will take to render, but the quality will be more sharper. You can now close the box and now Render out your Scene by clicking the clapperboard. This is my outcome:
The shadow isn't prefect, so you may need to adjust some of the settings. I won't go too in depth with this option, as Ray Trace Shadow gives better results, in my option. So un-click Use Depth Map Shadows and go down to Ray Trace Shadows and click the Use Ray Trace Shadows box. Without changing settings yet, render out the current scene to see how it looks already.
You can see the shadow i much sharper and crisper. To make the shadow look more realistic we need to change the setting for this shadow. We are gonna try to achieve a sharp shadow at the base of the object and then a softer shadow as it draws away.
The two settings to create this effect with is: Light Radius and Shadow Ray. The key is to getting a balance between them and experimenting for yourself, but for now I am gonna use: Light Radius 0.50 and Shadow Ray 15.
( The Higher you put up Shadow Ray and Light Radius the longer your render time, so find a balance between speed and quailty also.) Let's see what we get this time:
The shadow is looking pretty good on the maximum settings, but for a scene that has lots of objects, don't use max settings, unless your computer can run it. Lastly Ray Depth Limit is the setting which affects how many times a light ray can be reflect and still cause objects to cast a shadow.
To summarize Shadow Settings:
Light Radius: This controls the softness of the shadows casted by your light. Higher it is the more softer the shadow.
Shadow Rays: This controls the gain of the soft shadows. Higher it is the more gain the soft parts of the shadow will have.
Ray Depth Limit: This controls the amount of Shadows a single light source can cast. Higher it is the more shadows it gives off.
My final settings I used were.
Light Radius: 0.5
Shadow Raidus: 15
Ray Depth Limit: 1 (As I had a single item in the scene)
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