Maya 2011 MIA Exposure Photographic ToneMap Tutorial by Stuart Christensen

Mayas default Sun and Sky system is set up initially with a MIA_Exposure_Simple lens shader which does not really give you great control over the look of your scene. Instead, you may want to consider using the MIA_Exposure Photographic lens shader for gaining way more control over the final look, and to help you precisely fine tune textures and colors. In this tutorial by Stuart Christensen, we'll install and utilize an elegant MELscript by David Johnson of the DJX Blog, that will automate the process of connecting our Sun and Sky to the "ever so much better" MIA Exposure Photographic node, and review the settings and cover some common procedures for working with this camera tonemapper.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Maya
• 2011
• MIA
• Exposure
• Photographic
• Tonemapper
• Stuart
• Christensen
• Tutorial

[n8skow]

Can you update this video to take into account the revised (somewhat broken) color management of Maya 2012?

[deepfriedectoplasm]

@n8skow Not quite sure about this one as I am still on 2011 and probably will skip 2012 because 2013 or whatever will probably fix bugs that were inherent with the new viewport options in 2012. Out of curiosity, what problems were you encountering?

[sebazx6r]

Hi, I am having some issuses with Mi exposure photographic to work with passes. I have no problem with photographic. It just doesnt't affect the render passes. It is oki with simple render without spliting to passes.

Can You help me out with it?

[deepfriedectoplasm]

@sebazx6r Not quite sure what's going on with that, however, did you make sure to "update camera connections" on all of your cameras? If your scene is not real complex it is always OK to just do a master single pass. I'll mess around with some passess on my end to if I can find anything unusual and let you know if I find anything strange. Hope that helps. Sorry I can't provide more on this at the moment.

[MCGnoah]

Hi! Great Tutorial. I have a question about a problem I came across in maya 2010. I tried to manually disconnect the simple exposure node from the physical sky shader and replace it with the mia exposure photographic, but can't. It seems that the place that the simple exposure is naturally connected to is called miSkyExposure, which won't let me assign anything else to it. Is there a way to switch to the mia photgraphic exposure without using the special script?

[deepfriedectoplasm]

@MCGnoah In order to connect the "exposure photographic" manually you must jump through all sorts of hoops and that's why the script is perhaps the a must have for using the physical sun sky system. The process of manually connecting the nodes is very complex and takes a long time compared to just loading the script so that it always is attached to the phys/sun/sky when activated. I couldn't live without this script! Hope that helps.

[n8skow]

@deepfriedectoplasm (Gasp) you mean your not on maintainance?! ;)

The problem is just lack of an explanation of what this function is doing under the hood - and thus not knowing what all parameters still need to be tweeked...

[sebazx6r]

@deepfriedectoplasm

I did connect the lens to enviroment (sky) and camera. I used to do it manualy but there is a skript available on djx blog. I have used just one camera. It's all testing/ I will try to retriew the lens information using nuke. I've followed Michael Lampes Bog. I'll just "-" all the info from the RGBA chanel of a EXR 32bit file and See how it works with sun and sky and Irradinace or other type of indericte lightning as I want to find a good solution.

[deepfriedectoplasm]

@Hypersuperawesome If you are using a PC I'm not quite sure what the file tree looks like. My guess is that you would go to documents - maya - (you will probably see folders called 2011, projects, scripts, and Mayalog. Doubleclick the 2011 folder and there you will see folders for prefs, presets and scripts. I believe that this is the local scripts folder for PC but I'm not 100% sure. Do some googling!

[Hypersuperawesome]

@deepfriedectoplasm It says I should install it in my local folder? Mine's installed in my scripts folder, but I don't know where my local folder is! :S