Texture tools maya

There is no denying that a beautifully constructed model can be both impressive and inspiring. The ability to create something from a handful of vertices and ploygons is a true skill. What some artists struggly with is the idea of taking this model a step further, bringing it to life with colour, surface detail and specularity. The thought of painting texture maps, especially if your 2D skills are a little rusty, can be daunting, but they needn't be.

Over the course of this Maya tutorial, we will explore how to take a model of a futuristic space dock loader and fully texture it, readying it to be rendered. You will explore UV mapping, texture baking and generating a basic texture pass before you go further and spoil the clean, showroom finish with dirt, damage and the odd splash of alien ooze.

Having your model built is only the first stage and unfortunately you can't rush ahead and begin painting your textures yet. Before any paint, dirt, rust or alien fluids can be applied, you must first add UV mapping data to each model. This will help dictate where each pixel will lie across the surface of the model so you know exactly where you are going to be painting.

Before you begin to UV the model you have a decision to make. To Smooth Mesh or to Smooth your mesh. A tricky but crucial decision. Using the Smooth Mesh option will give your model the illusion that it has been subdivided - much like when using Subdivision Surfaces.

This route will also keep the polygon count low and manageable. Applying a Smooth operation to your model effectively bakes these subdivisions into the topology. This approach will make UV mapping easier, but at the cost of increased topology and a much larger file size.

For the purpose of this tutorial we will focus on the Smooth Mesh route, as it's a little trickier to work with when UV mapping. Rather than use an automatic mapping system to give your initial layout of UVs, focus on planar projections to start off. This will give you much more control over the first stages of your UV layout. Using the Unfold Constraints, first horizontally and then vertically, is a good way to start relaxing each UV shell while preventing it from collapsing in on itself.

There is however a quick way to get around this problem. With the initial UVs applied, before you use the Unfold UVs tool, duplicate the model and move it to one side so you can focus on it without getting distracted by the rest of the Loader.

What you can do now is apply a single Smooth to the model, effectively following our earlier Plan B. Baking just a single subdivision into the mesh will give you more topology to play with, meaning the Unfold UV tools will start to behave. At this stage you could choose to keep the subdivided model and delete the lower version, but if you want to retain the more economical option simply use the Transfer Attributes tool to copy the fixed UVs from this model back to the original.

With the process repeated for each element of the model, you now need to arrange the UV shells so they fit neatly onto each texture page. A sensible option would be to multiply the texture page into two and assign the torso to one page, and the limbs to another.

A good rule to work to while organising your UV shells is to apply a checkered texture and then try and keep each grid section uniform in size and shape to ensure even page distribution. You are going to linger in Maya for a little longer now, and make Photoshop wait its turn. While you have the model ready, with its UVs neatly organised, it makes sense for you to let Maya generate a few starter maps for you. Baking out occlusion and diffuse maps will speed up your workflow while also adding more depth and realism to the textures.

These starter maps are also handy to use as a guide while you are painting later, as a texture page with lots of elements can sometimes be difficult to navigate. Artisan brushes use grayscale images to define the brush profile or shape.

You can select from 40 predefined brush shapes, or you can create your own shapes using any image format supported by Maya. You can paint, erase and clone textures using Artisan brushes.

See also Artisan. Paint Effects brushes are defined by specific combinations of attribute settings and can be simple like pen, pastel, oil paint, and pencil brushes or they can simulate growth to get their look like flowers, feathers, hair, and fire brushes. The spotlight will fill in the dark areas—we will call it our fill light.

Here we can adjust the color and intensity of the light. Click the white box next to Color under the Directional Light Attributes.

Then I set the color to a very light blue , , RGB values because sunlight is actually slightly blue. Now select the spotlight and return to the Attribute Editor. The spotlight I'll change to a much lower intensity, like 0. I'll adjust my Penumbra angle up to 20 or so. Penumbra is the distance at which the light border goes from full strength to zero strength.

High values soften the border of the light dramatically. We only want shadows coming from obvious light sources, and this light is just intended to fill in dark areas, so under the Shadows tab, I will turn off Ray Trace shadows. This will make my darker areas different, but still illuminated. Here's a render that makes things look a bit more filled out and interesting:. The third kind of light I'll introduce is the point light.

A point light emits light in all directions, like a bulb. The farther away from the light, the darker it gets. Our scene, lit only with a point light, looks like this:. A single low bulb light produces a moody noir look due to the fast falloff. In order to render something, Maya needs a view to render from. Maya scenes come with four default cameras: Top, Side, Front, and Persp. While you can use any of these to render from, it helps to create a fifth. Then you can use the default views to work in, and leave your main view alone.

A new camera will appear, and you can position it anywhere you want using controls similar to those of the spotlight. Cameras have many attributes, but you only need to worry about a few for now:. Focal Length: 50mm is about the focal length of a human eye. Smaller than this is a wide-angle lens, which will make things appear smaller, with a greater perspective.

Longer is a zoom lens, which flattens things out. Environment : The background color of your camera when you render. Adjust this for personal preference—what's generally used is black, white, or sky blue. Once you have your camera placed, it often helps to lock it so that you don't accidentally move it and have trouble returning to your desired view. To lock a camera or any transform node , select the attributes in the Channel Box and right-click and choose Lock Selected.

Rendering is the act of creating an image or movie from your Maya file. Rendering is the only way to see your scene properly, as the real-time display will only show certain information and low-quality previews. Even if your model is intended for export to a real-time engine, you can use the rendering engines to bake details and lighting into your textures that might not be available or would be too slow for your real-time engine.

The egg as it appears in Maya left and as it appears when rendered right. This will render a view of your scene from the current camera, and bring it up in a new window, the Render View. If you have not already changed your default Renderer from Arnold to Maya Software, things might appear different or black. We will talk about Arnold a little bit later in this lesson.

The render view lets you see your scene output with more than just Viewport 2. You can now adjust your scene and re-render from this view. You can use the Render Region function to render just a small area if render times are high.

To change the resolution, click the Render Options icon Blue in the above image. This brings up your render settings. Here you can change the resolution, image output, and so forth. The Maya Software tab contains render engine-specific settings.

Here you can turn up your antialiasing settings, as well as turn on raytracing. Raytracing is needed for some features mentioned below. Texturing is an art, so there is no one right way to texture things. In fact, there are many ways to texture things in Maya, and many options for each approach to texturing.

This course will focus on using image maps, as this is the most widely used method for games and film alike. However, since many of the other ways are great for producing rendered content, we'll go over all the ways to skin your model, be it a cat, dog, or multi-tentacled monster from the abyss.

Let me introduce your new best friend: the Hypershade window. The Hypershade is a mess: bloated, complicated, and slow. Like your best friend, though, it has some redeeming qualities that keep you spending time together. Hypershade offers quick access to creating textures, as well as visual ways to represent those textures.

Don't worry if some of this gets confusing—we'll try out the most important features after our tour. Browser: This area is where you can navigate the existing shading nodes in your scene. Nodes are organized into types: Materials, Textures, Lights and so forth so you can easily find the one you are looking for and select it, or place it in the Node Graph.

Create: This is where you can find new nodes to make and integrate into your shading network. These are materials, textures, and blending nodes, as well as all sorts of special purpose stuff. Node Graph: This is where the much of the work happens. Connections between nodes from the browser or create area are made here, and you can view and edit them using this window. Property Editor: Where the other half of the work happens.

This is basically the attribute editor but stuffed into a corner. You can make new nodes and connections here as well by clicking on the checker boxes and following the prompts. Viewer: This just shows your material on a few generic objects. Generally speaking this isn't too useful since what we really care about is how our material looks on a specific object, but it can give you a ballpark. And because everyone likes memorization, here are some definitions to think about as we start talking about these textures, shaders, and so forth.

Material: A node that encapsulates texture data. The material determines what attributes a surface has, most notably its shininess. Any given polygon can only have one kind of material assigned to it at a time. A material is also called a shader. Texture: A node that contains color or value information, such as an image file or procedural noise.

Textures are used as inputs for materials to give greater control or detail. They come in two varieties: 2D and 3D. Utility: Nodes that alter materials or textures with some special function, such as blending, limiting, multiplying, or inverting. Shading Network: The whole collection of Materials, Textures, Lights, and Utilities used to determine the actual final look of a surface.

These are represented in the Hypershade as a graph of nodes and lines. This detailed marble egg has a fairly simple mathematical texture on it. On the left, you'll see the Create tab with a bunch of surfaces underneath it.

Clicking any of these surfaces will create a new Material node that you can then assign to an object. Let's run down the common ones:. Lambert: The most basic material. It has a flat, diffuse look. The default texture is a gray lambert.

Phong: Phong adds hard specular highlights bright spots and reflectivity into the mix. Phong surfaces are good for hard, shiny surfaces such as glass. Phong E: A simpler, and therefore faster, rendering version of Phong.

Blinn: The most frequently used, Blinn materials have soft speculars, and are less likely to produce artifacts or noise when used with high-frequency textures. Well suited to metallic objects. Anisotropic: A material that represents surfaces with micro grooves in them, such as CDs or shiny fabrics. The specular highlight in an anisotropic can be given a direction that matches the direction of the grooves in the surface. Unaltered materials. Let's assign a material to an object. Click Blinn in the Create tab.

A new node, blinn1, appears in the Browser, the node graph, and is highlighted in the Property Editor. In the property editor, change the Color to blue. You should see material appearance change in the Viewer. Now select an object in your scene. Right-click on the material node in the Hypershade window, and select Assign Material to Selection from the marking menu.

Congrats, your first textured object! Blue plastic! Now, let's make things a bit more complicated and create a little shader network. In the Attribute Editor for your blinn1, click the checkered box by the Color slider. The Create Render Node window pops up, waiting for you to select the kind of Texture node you want to connect to this Material node. Choose Marble, down towards the bottom of the 3D Textures section. Now your object is red white with red streaks.

You can render if you want and see the difference between the real time display and the rendered image. Now select the blinn1 tab again, and this time click the box near Transparency.