Hi there all,
I have been working on modeling a full interior house, and pretty much got the basic sculpture done. Now I am working on the lighting part though I have one question.

When I first tried applying lights, in my book that comes with Maya 6 unlimitied, it describes that if you do not turn on depth map shadow light will pass through all abjects. So following the tutorial I placed the spot light inside the lamp and turned on depth map shadow. Though the problem that I got was that the body of the lamp didn't light up. Though after placing an additional point light in the center of the room and setting its instensity very low, it started to define the body of the lamp better and giving better results throughout the entire room.

Now in the past I thought I heard that Maya is pretty accrurate with lighting. Though my question is if this is true then why do I need at least 2 lights to properly light up a lamp and giving a room better definition?

I have posted an image of my 2 renders. The first showing lhow I used 2 lights to get a better results and the second being my first try with one light. BTW I appollogize for the 2 images being so small but I didn't want to place to seperate images which can lead to slow downloads here and knowing that the maxuim image size is 800x600 I didn't want to break any of the rules.

Though anyway as you can see, the image to left is still not the greatest but you can get the idea what I am pointing out that it is a lot better then image to right with only one spot light.