Telling tales// Pokoyo lighting test

Today my work partner and I tested similar lighting to that featured in the children's animated series 'Pokoyo'. We decided to test this lighting because we felt the colour pallets and over all character design for our characters would be well complicated with this particular lighting; considering our character designs are similar in a cartoony way to those featured in Pokoyo.

We achieved this lighting effect by following these steps;

• In 'Render Settings' click the 'Render Using' opinion of mental ray
• Next scroll down to 'Render Options' and make sure the button 'Enable default lights' is un-clicked
• Then under the 'lighting' segment of Render settings, make sure 'Global illusion' isn't clicked and that 'Final Gathering' is
• Finally in the outliner under 'perspective' (or the camera you're using to render out) make sure the environments environment background colour is white 
• If nothing strange occurs within Maya, these steps should allow you to achieve the 'Pokoyo lighting'!

Here is a screenshot of the finished lighting (on just the model)

Both me and my work partner both really liked how the rendered images with the lighting looked, so we've decided to use this lighting for our project. However using it with the environment gave the street I'd modeled this dull dark shadowed appearance - But I easily improved the quality of the lighting by adding a simple Area light, hovering above the whole environment.