To render out my machine sequences, I have spent around a week because of some issues and wrong lighting during rendering. I have rendered three times for this sequence as the following videos show.

In my first render, as the video shows, it looks too bright in the scene, and the most serious issue is my texture, the middle gear looks odd when it rotated. Also, there are no shadows on the ground and back. The reason why it can happen because when I check the render in Maya, I only use Arnold render and only render out one frame to see how’s the machine looks, so when I render out a sequence, it looks different and issues come up.

Before I redo all rendering settings, I have double-checked my textures, and I find out the issues. I have put Height textures on my Normal map and put the Normal map on the Roughness map, so these will cause issues with my machine’s textures. After I switch them on the correct positions, it looks much better than before.

However, I have reset my lighting before the last step. I didn’t change the position of my two lights, but I have changed their light temperature height and angles. As the original background shows, there is a big area of light on the right side and the light on the left-hand side looks smaller and warmer. After I reset these lights, the shadows come up and the machine is fit in the scene now.

Overall, I have experience in rendering and I will render out 10-50 frames for testing before purpose render.