Chapter 4: Creating Textures

Maya 8 at a Glance

Chapter 4: Creating Textures

Shaders

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• Lambert: No highlights

• Phong: Distinct specular highlights

• Phong E: Greater controls for softer highlights

• Blinn: Versatile and soft highlights

• Anisotropic: Directional highlights, such as hair or metal

Shaders

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• Ramp: Control color changes across the shader

• Layered: Allows multiple layers to be stacked and combined

Common Attributes of Shaders

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• Color

• Transparency

• Ambient Color

• Incandescence

• Bump Mapping

• Diffuse

• Translucence

The Hypershade• The Hypershade is the place where you create and edit shaders

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Textures• Textures are images that can be mapped to almost any surface material

• They can be bitmap images or can be created procedurally

• Bitmap textures can be created in an external program, such as Photoshop, or inside Maya using 3D Paint

• Procedural textures are created using mathematical formulae internal to Maya

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Procedural Textures

• 2D Procedural Textures• Bulge

• Checker

• Cloth

• Fractal

• Grid

• Noise

• Ramp

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Procedural Textures

• 3D Procedural Textures• Brownian

• Cloud

• Leather

• Granite

• Marble

• Rock

• Solid Fractal

• Wood

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Bump and Displacement

• Bump Maps• Give a surface a sense of roughness and depth

• Only affects the way light interacts with the surface

• Does not modify the geometry, so edges are still smoth

• Displacement Maps• Actually changes the surface of the geometry

• Requires more processing and rendering power

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UVs and Texture Placement

• UV mapping overlays a texture onto a flattened model (done in the UV Texture Editor)

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• 2D textures are mapped using a place2dTexture node

• 3D textures are mapped using a place3DTexture node

Photoshop Integration• Maya supports importing and exporting the photoshop PSD format

• Both Maya and Photoshop can use layers to combine multiple bitmaps into a single file

• Shading networks are created in the Hypershade based on the layers of attributes in the PSD file

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