In my previous post, I was focused on matching the camera to the photo set created by Sasha Oullett, however due to the lack of photographic references I decided to work with this photo set by Katie Veneman. And so because I chose another photo set, I have to redo the camera match by taking the new metadata and applying it in Maya.
In addition I set up an HDR dome by taking the all the HDR images of the chrome ball and merging them together in Photoshop. Then I cropped in, so that just the chrome ball was present. I went into Maya and created a dome with a polySphere then projected the HDR image onto it and that created the ambient light for my scene.
By creating my dome I was able to pinpoint the location of the sun in my scene, so I created a spotlight, increased its intensity, and placed it in the position of the sun to simulate the sun light. I had to tweak the spotlights position a little to match the one in my reference.
I also set up Render layers consisting of the Beauty, Shadow, and Occlusion. The beauty will contain all my objects, but the primary visibility of my ground plane and HDR dome will be toggled off. My Shadow layer will only contain my key light, ground plane, and object. The primary visibility of my object will be toggled off and the ground plane will be assigned an AiShadowMatte shader. The occlusion layer will only contain my object and the ground plane and both will be assigned an AiAmbientOcclusion shader.
Once I set up my sphere and match it with my reference, adjust its surface shader and create a bounce using the ground plane, I'll be able to render out my layers and composite my image together in Nuke for the final result. Stay Tuned!