This is the first of several tutorials where Im going to teach you how to render and use all the different render layers/passes to light and shade your scenes using Maya and Nuke.

Requirements:

• Maya
• Nuke

Maya

We need to create a new scene in Maya and create three difference lights, one for the Key Light, another for the Fill Light and another for the Back Light. We then change the color of each light, Blue for the Key Light, Green for the Fill Light and Red for the Back Light.

Now we select all the lights and our main model, and we assign them to a New Render Layer and named it DIF.



We create a new Lambert and we change the color to White and the Diffuse to 1.000



We assign it to our model and we do a render this is what we have:



Now lets create a new Render Layer named SPCA with our Lights and Model and we create a Blinn with Color to Black and Diffuse to 0.000 and Specular Color to White.



We assign it to our model and we do a render this is what we have:



Now in a new Render Layer named SPCB we create a Phong with Color to Black and Diffuse to 0.000 and Specular Color to White.



We assign it to our model and we do a render this is what we have:



We need to batch render our scene in order to render all our render layers, we need to put at the end of the File name prefix in order to have the RenderLayer name in our filename.



Now in our DIF renderlayer Render Settings we need to create a Render Overlay in the Final Gathering option



Right Click Final Gather and select Create Layer Overlay.



And now all you need to do is Batch Render the scene.