IntroductionWelcome| 00:00 | (music playing)
| | 00:04 | Hello! I'm Aaron F. Ross.
| | 00:05 | And welcome to Creating Shader
Networks in Maya and Mental Ray.
| | 00:09 | In this course we will examine Maya's
Hypershade Material editor in depth.
| | 00:13 | We will customize core material
attributes, such as Diffuse Color and
| | 00:16 | Specular Highlights.
| | 00:18 | I'll show you how to achieve commonly
needed material effects, including
| | 00:21 | glossiness and reflection, transparency and
translucence, and surface relief or roughness.
| | 00:27 | In the Hypershade, we will see how to
work most efficiently by duplicating nodes
| | 00:31 | in constructing branching networks.
| | 00:32 | The Mental Ray renderer offers many
advanced features not found in the standard
| | 00:37 | Maya software renderer.
| | 00:39 | I'll show you how to leverage
its power by employing Mental Ray
| | 00:42 | Specific Materials and Maps.
| | 00:44 | Additionally, we'll take a look at
constructing non-photo real materials for
| | 00:48 | stylized artistic looks.
| | 00:50 | The course concludes with an introduction
to Maya Toon. Maya's feature set for
| | 00:54 | building Shader Networks is deep and powerful.
| | 00:57 | I'm looking forward to sharing my
knowledge with you in creating Shader Networks
| | 01:01 | in Maya and Mental Ray.
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| Setting up the course project| 00:00 | We will need to set up a project folder
for this course, and in fact, basically
| | 00:04 | you will always need to set up
a project folder in Maya.
| | 00:08 | And the reason that you need to do that
is so that all the links to the various
| | 00:12 | files, such as textures are preserved,
regardless of where your files are.
| | 00:19 | Maya relies upon the project
folder structure at all times.
| | 00:23 | So you need to observe that procedure always.
| | 00:26 | If you don't have access to the
exercise files and you're not a premium
| | 00:30 | subscriber to lynda.com, then you'll
need to create your own project folder.
| | 00:36 | Let's do that first, I will show
you how to create a project folder.
| | 00:39 | Go into the File menu and choose
Project Window. This will tell you what your
| | 00:45 | Current Project is and where it is.
| | 00:48 | I have just got the default project in the
current users documents Maya Projects folder.
| | 00:53 | I'll create a New Folder by clicking on New.
| | 00:56 | And I will just put it in the same
location here, just in that default location
| | 01:00 | on the C drive, but I will
give this a new name here.
| | 01:04 | And let's call it shader_networks_Project.
| | 01:10 | Then we'll simply click Accept.
Two things have happened now; a series
| | 01:14 | of folders have been created for the
various types of assets; and Maya is now
| | 01:19 | pointing at that folder as
it's sort of root or home-base.
| | 01:23 | So let's take a look at that.
| | 01:24 | If minimize Maya, you'll see here is
the folder that I just created. It's in My
| | 01:30 | Documents maya projects.
| | 01:33 | And there is shader_networks_Project.
| | 01:35 | As you proceed through the course,
you will want to save scenes into scenes.
| | 01:40 | When you build textures, you will
need to put your images inside of the
| | 01:45 | source images folder first,
before you build the textures.
| | 01:49 | So that's if you need to
create one from scratch.
| | 01:53 | If you are premium subscriber and you
can use the exercise files that come with
| | 01:58 | the course, then I've already set that
up for you. Here is the exercise files
| | 02:02 | folder, I have just got that on my Desktop here.
| | 02:05 | And you can see if I open up Scenes,
there's a whole bunch of scene files inside there.
| | 02:10 | And if open sourceimages, likewise, you
will see that there's a lot of texture
| | 02:14 | files inside there currently.
| | 02:15 | So I will go back to Maya, just
hitting Alt+Tab to go back to Maya.
| | 02:20 | And if you just want to point to an
existing project folder, go to the File menu
| | 02:25 | and choose Set Project.
| | 02:28 | And then you just need to navigate to
wherever that project is. That's going to
| | 02:31 | be, in this, case on the Desktop. Click
on that and just select the root of that
| | 02:36 | exercise files folder and click Set.
| | 02:39 | And now, if you choose File>Open Scene,
it'll take you directly to the
| | 02:44 | current project scenes folder, and
then you can go ahead and open those
| | 02:48 | scenes. I will close that.
| | 02:50 | One last thing I would like to mention is
you might notice that I'm using a
| | 02:54 | different interface in Maya
than the default user interface.
| | 02:59 | The default user interface in Maya
currently is white text on a black
| | 03:04 | background, and I'm not a
big fan of that, frankly.
| | 03:08 | I think it causes eye strain and
it's harder for me to my work done.
| | 03:12 | I really prefer the old-school
black text on a white background.
| | 03:16 | And you do that by modifying
the shortcut to Maya.
| | 03:20 | I am not going to cover how to do
that in this course. If you're interested
| | 03:24 | in using a Maya interface other
than the default, you can set that up.
| | 03:29 | I covered that in a different course,
which is Maya 2011 Creating
| | 03:34 | Natural Environments.
| | 03:35 | And I talk about how to do that
on both the Mac and on Windows.
| | 03:40 | We have setup our project and
we are really ready to begin now
| | 03:43 | with Creating Shader Networks in Maya.
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1. Hypershade Interface and WorkflowsCreating a reference to save disk space| 00:00 | Before we really get started in earnest
in Creating Shader Networks in Maya,
| | 00:05 | I want to talk a little bit
about referencing files.
| | 00:09 | This is a method whereby you can load
one scene into another scene, and it's
| | 00:13 | very useful in cases where you're basically
just reusing the same data multiple times.
| | 00:20 | That's what we do in this course, in fact.
| | 00:23 | We've got almost 90 movies and the sample
scene that I'm providing is 30 MB in size.
| | 00:31 | I really don't need to save that out
80 or 90 times, that would be
| | 00:36 | unnecessary and redundant and it would
increase the download time significantly.
| | 00:41 | So to save disk space and to save
you the trouble of having to download
| | 00:45 | gigabytes of data, I'm using referencing
in almost all of the scenes in this
| | 00:50 | title, in this course.
| | 00:51 | So here is how referencing works.
| | 00:54 | You've got a blank scene or a scene that
maybe has stuff in it, but you're going
| | 00:57 | to link to another scene that's
external to the current scene.
| | 01:02 | Do that by going to the File menu
and choose Create Reference, click on that.
| | 01:08 | Now I get a dialog that's
very similar to the Open File dialog.
| | 01:12 | I want to scroll down in the Options here
to show you something, Namespace Options.
| | 01:17 | There is a very important switch here
that's new in Maya 2013, and I want to
| | 01:23 | make sure that it says
Merge into selected namespace.
| | 01:27 | What that's going to do is
it's going to bring the referenced data in and it's
| | 01:32 | not going to mangle the names of the nodes.
| | 01:36 | In the past what would happen is it
would prefix the referenced file name on
| | 01:42 | each and every node, making it very,
very difficult for you to figure out what
| | 01:47 | you're looking at, because every single
node would have a name that began with
| | 01:52 | the filename that you're referencing in.
| | 01:56 | But now we have this wonderful switch,
which is on here, meaning that it's not
| | 02:01 | going to do that anymore, it's just
going to bring the referenced data in and
| | 02:05 | it's not going to mangle the
node names. So that's good.
| | 02:08 | Let's scroll down here and the
one I want to bring in is called
| | 02:11 | still_life_master_reference,
and that's the one that I'm using throughout
| | 02:15 | almost all of this course.
| | 02:17 | Click on that and click the Reference button.
| | 02:21 | And now you'll see we get a
whole bunch of data in here;
| | 02:24 | we've got all these geometry and cameras,
and there's no shaders in here, there
| | 02:32 | are no materials in here currently to speak of.
| | 02:34 | Press the 5 key so we can see the Shaded View.
| | 02:38 | So that's just the process of referencing.
| | 02:41 | If we go back into the File menu,
we can choose the Reference Editor,
| | 02:48 | open that up, and this shows me which
references are currently in the scene
| | 02:54 | and whether they're loaded or not.
| | 02:56 | If I tick this little checkbox off,
it just basically unloads the reference
| | 03:02 | from memory, but it doesn't remove the
link proper, and I can just click this
| | 03:07 | again and reload that reference.
| | 03:10 | If I wanted to completely delete that
reference, I could select it and press the
| | 03:14 | Delete button up here, Remove that reference.
| | 03:17 | Or if I wanted to add another reference,
I could also do it through this dialog.
| | 03:21 | I could click to Create a reference.
| | 03:23 | For example, I can load in my lights.
I've got another reference here that says
| | 03:28 | still_life_lights_interior_01,
go ahead and click to reference that in.
| | 03:34 | Now you'll see I've got some area lights in my scene.
| | 03:38 | If I press the 7 key, we'll see that lighting.
| | 03:42 | You don't really have a lot of control
over the referenced data.
| | 03:47 | In other words, I can do things like
move stuff around, or maybe change some
| | 03:52 | attributes, but that's not really a good practice.
| | 03:54 | Basically you want to leave that reference alone.
| | 03:58 | You can assign shaders to it, or you
can change some attributes if you want,
| | 04:02 | but it's best practice to not make
major changes to the referenced file data
| | 04:08 | or the referenced models.
| | 04:10 | And sometimes you'll try to do stuff
like that and you'll get a warning,
| | 04:14 | Maya will say, sorry you can't
do that on a referenced file.
| | 04:18 | So that's just the basic process of referencing.
| | 04:20 | Again, I'm doing that throughout
this course to save disk space.
| | 04:24 | If I save this out now, let's save it as,
| | 04:28 | we'll call this 01_01_reference_finished.
| | 04:39 | That's going to be a very, very small file.
To prove that to you I can go
| | 04:44 | into Windows Explorer, or I could
just go into the Open Scene dialog,
| | 04:50 | just to show you this file size here,
| | 04:51 | reference_finished has a size of 85 KB,
t's a tiny, tiny, tiny file.
| | 04:58 | Scrolling down to the bottom and you'll
see the file that's been referenced in
| | 05:02 | the master scene is 33 MB. In fact,
almost all of these that you see here
| | 05:09 | are referencing that 33 MB scene file.
| | 05:13 | So instead of having 80 or 90 scene files
that are all 30 MB in size, I've got
| | 05:19 | just a few that are very large and then
the rest of them are using referencing
| | 05:24 | to keep the file size down.
| | 05:26 | As you can see, these are 0.1 MB in size.
| | 05:30 | Okay, so that's just basically
how referencing works in Maya.
| | 05:33 | I'll be doing that throughout this course.
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| Getting familiar with the Hypershade| 00:00 | Let's spend some time getting
familiar with the Maya Hypershade.
| | 00:04 | Hypershade is a window that allows
you to create and edit materials.
| | 00:10 | You'll see that in this scene I have no objects.
There is no geometry currently
| | 00:15 | in the scene, but I've got lots of
materials actually in the Hypershade that
| | 00:19 | I've created previously.
| | 00:21 | That's actually an indicator that a
Maya scene file can include lots of things.
| | 00:26 | It could have objects, meshes;
it could have animation;
| | 00:30 | or it could just be only a material library.
And that's what this particular scene file is.
| | 00:35 | Let's open up the Hypershade, let's go
to Window>Rendering Editors>Hypershade.
| | 00:43 | Let's maximize that to get a
little bit more screen area.
| | 00:46 | The Hypershade is made up of three main areas.
| | 00:50 | You've got the tabbed areas up here,
and this will show us all of the materials
| | 00:56 | and other shading nodes in the scene.
| | 00:59 | I could click here, for example, on Textures
and we'll see all the textures in
| | 01:03 | the scene, or Utilities, we can see all the utilities.
| | 01:07 | There are other things too;
| | 01:08 | for example, Cameras, those can be
displayed up here as well.
| | 01:11 | If I had lights, they would be shown here too.
| | 01:15 | So this is our main area of the Hypershade interface.
| | 01:19 | Then below that is the work area,
and this is where you will graph networks
| | 01:23 | and make connections.
| | 01:24 | Over here on the left you have a
section where you can actually create
| | 01:29 | different shading nodes, and you'll
see that there are lots of them here.
| | 01:33 | This is all of them listed.
| | 01:34 | If I scroll down here you'll see
that there are many, many, many, many
| | 01:39 | different options here for shading nodes.
| | 01:42 | And at first, this might be a bit intimidating.
| | 01:45 | I have to admit that the first time
I opened up the Hypershade I was left a bit
| | 01:50 | perplexed, because I didn't even know where to begin.
| | 01:53 | I saw that there were so many possibilities
here that I was frankly a bit intimidated.
| | 01:58 | But the reason that these things are all
here is because it gives us the freedom
| | 02:02 | to create what we need to create.
We're not limited.
| | 02:06 | It's better to have more choices than fewer,
especially in a professional 3D program like Maya.
| | 02:12 | So as you work in Maya and you get familiar
with the Hypershade, you'll kind of
| | 02:16 | build up a tolerance to the sort of
overwhelming nature of it; and over time
| | 02:22 | it will become second nature.
You become accustomed to that.
| | 02:26 | You'll see also that there are categories here.
I could click on each one of these
| | 02:29 | and that will just filter the list here
so we only see those types of shading nodes;
| | 02:34 | for example, like a Surface Material or 2D Textures.
| | 02:39 | That's the basics of the Maya Hypershade interface.
We're going to learn how to
| | 02:43 | create shading nodes and connect them
in subsequent movies.
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| Creating shading nodes| 00:00 | Let's create a shading node and
apply it on to this tablecloth object.
| | 00:05 | I will go ahead and open up Hypershade,
Window>Rendering Editors>Hypershade.
| | 00:12 | And you can see here now in this version
of the scene, I've got nothing in here
| | 00:16 | except for three default shading nodes.
| | 00:19 | You will see lambert1, particlecloud1
and shaderglow1.
| | 00:25 | Those are Read Only nodes
that exist in every Maya scene.
| | 00:30 | You cannot really do much to these.
| | 00:33 | You can't rename them, you can't delete them.
| | 00:36 | They're there as the defaults for new objects.
| | 00:39 | So when you create a new mesh object
or NURBS object, it's going to have the
| | 00:43 | lambert1 material assigned to it.
Or, if you create a new particle system, then
| | 00:49 | when you choose a cloud particle,
you'll get this particle cloud shader
| | 00:53 | assigned automatically.
| | 00:54 | So these are the default shading nodes.
| | 00:57 | We want to create a new shading
node and apply it on to the tablecloth.
| | 01:02 | And there are two main ways of doing that;
| | 01:04 | one is from the Hypershade.
| | 01:06 | And all you've got to do is just click on
one of the nodes over here to create it.
| | 01:11 | So for example, if I wanted to
create a shader that did not have any
| | 01:15 | highlights, I would click on Lambert here.
| | 01:18 | That's a material that doesn't have any highlights.
| | 01:21 | That's lambert2 currently.
| | 01:24 | What I want to do is actually open up
the Attribute Editor and change the look
| | 01:29 | of this lambert2 material.
| | 01:32 | With that node selected here, I can hit
Ctrl+A to open up the Attribute Editor.
| | 01:36 | I can just change the color for example.
| | 01:38 | Maybe I would open up the Color Picker here,
and change it to some other hue,
| | 01:47 | lavender color and maybe
rename it while I am at it.
| | 01:51 | Maybe I will call that lavender_lambert.
| | 01:54 | I strongly recommend that you always rename
everything immediately after you make it.
| | 01:59 | Otherwise, all your scenes are going to
have everything named lambert2,
| | 02:04 | lambert3, lambert5, and you'll
have no idea what you're dealing with.
| | 02:07 | I very strongly recommend that you
rename everything as you go, and hit the
| | 02:11 | Enter key in there too to make
sure that, that actually takes.
| | 02:14 | So now I can assign the material
and close the Attribute Editor.
| | 02:18 | There's numerous ways of assigning
the material to an object.
| | 02:23 | One way is to simply drag and drop.
| | 02:26 | But to drag and drop, you'll need to
use the middle-mouse button, and this is
| | 02:29 | pretty common throughout Maya.
| | 02:31 | You can't just use the left-mouse
button to drag and drop.
| | 02:35 | You will need to hold down the middle-mouse,
and then drag over on to the object.
| | 02:40 | Now that's actually assigned.
Let's minimize the Hypershade.
| | 02:44 | In order to see that, we'll need to select
one of these panels and press the 5 key.
| | 02:50 | And when I press the 5 key, of course,
I'm going into a Shaded mode.
| | 02:54 | Now we can see that in fact that is assigned.
| | 02:57 | We've got that lavender_lambert assigned.
| | 02:59 | I will tap the spacebar and just make that bigger.
| | 03:02 | There is another way that we can assign materials.
| | 03:04 | If I go back to the Hypershade,
we make a new material, a second one.
| | 03:08 | I will click on let's say Blinn, that will
give me some shiny highlights, and
| | 03:13 | now I got a new Blinn material.
| | 03:15 | Once again opening the Attribute Editor
and renaming this.
| | 03:18 | Let me call this one crimson_blinn or
something like that, and change up this color.
| | 03:26 | Give that a dark red color,
and then assign it to the object.
| | 03:33 | I can assign it a different way.
| | 03:35 | I can just go ahead and select the object
and then right-click on the
| | 03:40 | Shader node, and I get the Marking menu,
which is the context-sensitive right-click menu.
| | 03:47 | You will see one of the options is
Assign Material to Selection.
| | 03:51 | And as soon as I do that, it's assigned.
| | 03:54 | This is helpful because, for example,
I could select a whole bunch of objects in
| | 03:58 | my scene and then right-click and assign them all at once.
| | 04:02 | I can also assign from this Materials section up here.
| | 04:04 | I don't have to be in the work area.
| | 04:07 | If I select my object, I can go up here
and right-click and choose Assign
| | 04:10 | Material to Selection, and that does the same thing.
| | 04:13 | So that's one way I can create shader nodes
and assign them to an object.
| | 04:18 | There is an even quicker way of doing
that which is directly in the viewport you
| | 04:22 | can select your object and right-click,
and you will see Assign New Material
| | 04:28 | or Assign Existing Material.
| | 04:30 | If I choose Assign New, it's going
to create the new shading node and
| | 04:34 | additionally assign it in the same action.
| | 04:38 | So when I release my mouse button,
I get a dialog it opens up, and it looks
| | 04:42 | just like that Create section we saw in the Hypershade.
| | 04:45 | This is the Assign New Material dialog.
| | 04:48 | Let's make it a Lambert material.
| | 04:49 | I will click on that.
| | 04:51 | It's assigned and the Attribute Editor
opens automatically, so that's convenient.
| | 04:56 | And then I can go ahead and play around with
color for example, or give this a new name.
| | 05:01 | I'll call it green_lambert or something like that.
| | 05:03 | I can play around with the color here, assign that.
| | 05:09 | But the thing is that while the
object is selected, it's going to be
| | 05:13 | highlighted and it might be difficult
to tell what you're doing because the
| | 05:18 | color of the shader is going to kind
of fight with the wireframe color here.
| | 05:23 | Selected objects in Maya are always
lit up in a Wireframe mode, and either in
| | 05:29 | white or in green depending upon whether
it's the most recently selected object or not.
| | 05:34 | So that's kind of problematic.
| | 05:35 | But I am going to show you how
you can kind of work around that.
| | 05:39 | If you want to continue making adjustments
to your Attribute Editor, what you
| | 05:43 | can do is you can copy the Attribute
Editor off to its own tab down here.
| | 05:47 | I will click on Copy Tab.
| | 05:50 | Now green_lambert is in its own window,
and I don't even need the Attribute
| | 05:54 | Editor anymore, and I can even close it.
| | 05:56 | I can deselect the object.
| | 05:58 | Now I can see what I'm doing.
| | 06:03 | So that's how you can create and assign shading nodes.
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| Using the Hypershade with the Attribute Editor| 00:00 | Let's look at how to integrate the
Hypershade and Attribute Editor panels.
| | 00:06 | I'll assign a new material to my tablecloth here;
| | 00:09 | select it, right-click and choose Assign New Material.
| | 00:13 | I'll make it a Blinn material, which will
have shiny highlights, click on that.
| | 00:16 | And I'll rename it, and I'll call this one tablecloth_blinn.
| | 00:23 | As always in Maya, you can't use white space,
you've got to put an underscore in, and press Enter.
| | 00:28 | Now I want to add a map to this particular shader here.
| | 00:33 | So a map of course is some data that's going
to vary a material property across its surface.
| | 00:39 | For example, we could assign a defuse
color map to change the color of the
| | 00:44 | object so that it's a different color
in one place than in another.
| | 00:48 | We can of course use different types of maps.
| | 00:51 | Let's use a file map because that's the most common.
| | 00:55 | One way to do that is directly from the Attribute Editor.
| | 00:58 | I can click over here on one of these
little checker icons, and that will create
| | 01:02 | a new shading node, and connect it
to that material attribute.
| | 01:07 | I'll click here to add a render node,
and I get a dialog popping up, Create Render Node.
| | 01:14 | And let's make it a file texture.
| | 01:15 | I have got some files already in the exercise files folder.
| | 01:20 | So I can create a File node.
| | 01:23 | So I'll click on File, and the
Attribute Editor opens to that file node's
| | 01:28 | properties, and I'll need to browse to load that file in.
| | 01:33 | I'll click on the little Browse Folder button.
| | 01:35 | It takes me directly to my current project source images.
| | 01:39 | Here it is, Exercise_Files>sourceimages.
| | 01:42 | It's of critical importance that you've
placed your images in your current
| | 01:48 | project source images before you get to this point.
| | 01:52 | If you start navigating around to try to find
your files somewhere else on your
| | 01:56 | hard-drive, then to put it bluntly, you're doing it wrong.
| | 02:00 | You cannot do that in Maya.
| | 02:02 | You need to keep all of your images inside
the current project source images.
| | 02:06 | That's the only safe place to put them.
| | 02:09 | If you link to a file that's somewhere
outside your current project,
| | 02:13 | then it's almost guaranteed that later on
that link is going to get broken.
| | 02:18 | It's very, very important that, again,
you've placed all of your images inside
| | 02:22 | source images before you get to this stage.
| | 02:26 | So let's see if we can select one of these.
| | 02:28 | Let's try, I've got pattern_seamless_victorian_black_and_white.
| | 02:34 | Click on that, and click Open.
| | 02:36 | Now that's actually been assigned, but
I won't see it in the viewport currently
| | 02:41 | because I'm only seeing a shaded view.
| | 02:43 | I want to click in the viewport and press the
6 key, and now I can actually see that texture.
| | 02:50 | So of course, 4 is wireframe, 5 is shaded
without texturing, and 6 is shaded and textured.
| | 02:58 | So that's one way that you can use the
Attribute Editor to create shader nodes.
| | 03:04 | Let's look at that through the Hypershade,
and we'll do it again in Hypershade.
| | 03:08 | Go in Window>Rendering Editors>Hypershade.
| | 03:12 | And let's make another material.
| | 03:15 | I'll create another Blinn, click on Blinn.
Then if that's selected, then I
| | 03:20 | can change its attributes over here,
and I'll call this one tablecloth2_blinn.
| | 03:29 | I can follow a similar process except
I can create the nodes from here in the
| | 03:34 | Create panel of the Hypershade and
then I can drag them over to wherever they
| | 03:39 | need to be in the Attribute Editor.
| | 03:42 | I'll create a file map, and that's in
the category 2D Textures, click on that,
| | 03:47 | and then click File and it creates the File node.
| | 03:51 | I can back out here a little bit
using either the wheel, or the Alt and
| | 03:56 | right-mouse button. I can move these
around a little bit with a left-mouse button.
| | 04:02 | You can see that not only was a File
node created, but also a Placement node.
| | 04:07 | That just allows us to control the
tiling and other attributes of how this
| | 04:12 | 2D file is going to appear on the surface.
| | 04:16 | So I'll click on File, that File node
and I want to browse for a file.
| | 04:21 | It takes me back to my current project
source images, and let's try something else.
| | 04:26 | Let's do this masonry.
| | 04:29 | This is going to look a little bit
interesting with masonry applied to that,
| | 04:32 | but it's just a demo.
| | 04:33 | So you'll see now I've got file2,
it's got something in it, very good.
| | 04:38 | Then I can select the shading node
so that I can see it displayed in the
| | 04:43 | Attribute Editor, and then to connect this,
I'll middle-mouse+drag the File node
| | 04:49 | onto the color of the material,
middle-mouse+drag-and-drop.
| | 04:55 | And the safest thing to do is
to drop on to the actual name.
| | 04:59 | Sometimes when you do this in the
Attitude Editor, if you drop it on to some
| | 05:03 | other area, it might not take.
| | 05:05 | You just need to make sure that you
see a dashed line outlining the attribute
| | 05:08 | that you want to map. I'll
middle-mouse+drag and release and that
| | 05:12 | connection has been made.
| | 05:14 | Now I just want to assign that to the tablecloth.
| | 05:18 | So again, I can middle-mouse+drag-and-drop,
and there you go.
| | 05:22 | I've got masonry on my tablecloth.
| | 05:25 | That's the basics of how you can integrate
the Hypershade with the Attitude Editor.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Setting viewport render options| 00:00 | In order to see what you're doing in
the viewport, you will probably need
| | 00:03 | to change the options for the Viewport Renderer
or the Display mode for the viewport.
| | 00:10 | And you will find that certain modes
may support certain material types or
| | 00:15 | texture types, and other modes may
support other material or texture types.
| | 00:20 | So you kind of have to feel your way through this.
| | 00:23 | If what you see in the viewport doesn't
look right to you, you can choose one of
| | 00:27 | the other viewport rendering modes.
| | 00:29 | A good example of this would be a procedural
texture like a fractal noise pattern.
| | 00:36 | A procedural texture is one that's
generated internally by the 3D program, by
| | 00:41 | Maya in this case, and that's not
referring to an external file like a bitmap.
| | 00:46 | So let's create a new procedural material here.
| | 00:49 | So I'll select my tablecloth, and right-click
and choose Assign New Material.
| | 00:55 | I'll make it a Blinn material, and I'll
rename this, and I'll call it fractal_blinn.
| | 01:02 | And then in the color channel, I'll click
to create a new render node, and it
| | 01:06 | will be a 2D Texture called Fractal.
| | 01:10 | Now that's been assigned. I won't see
it in the viewport unless I actually give
| | 01:15 | focus to the viewport and press the 6 key.
| | 01:17 | So I want to click in the view and then press 6.
| | 01:21 | So that looks kind of fuzzy, it doesn't look so good.
| | 01:24 | I know actually, that my texture looks
a lot better than that, and I can test
| | 01:28 | this by doing render here.
| | 01:30 | I can click to render the current frame
by clicking on this clapboard.
| | 01:34 | So I know that in fact it's a lot better looking
than what we see in the viewport here.
| | 01:38 | What I'll do is I'll change the Viewport Renderer.
| | 01:41 | Within each panel, you've got a panel menu,
and one of those items is Renderer.
| | 01:49 | You'll see I have three choices;
| | 01:50 | Default Quality is the safest one
but also the lowest quality.
| | 01:55 | It's really compatible with almost
everything, but as you can see, it's
| | 01:59 | looking pretty fuzzy here.
| | 02:00 | Let's try High Quality Rendering.
| | 02:02 | So that's much better.
| | 02:04 | That's a much better approximation
of what we would expect to see.
| | 02:08 | If we dolly in really close with Alt and
right-mouse, we can see that it's still
| | 02:12 | a little bit fuzzy however.
| | 02:14 | We can improve that quality by going
in to the High Quality Render Settings,
| | 02:19 | going into those options.
| | 02:20 | I'll go to Renderer>High Quality Rendering,
and click on the Option box, get that open.
| | 02:28 | The most important thing here
is the Color Texture Resolution.
| | 02:32 | Let's see if I bring it down to only 256 pixels
and press Apply, you can see
| | 02:40 | that I didn't really change much.
| | 02:41 | But let's try cranking that up to 1024
and press Apply. There you go!
| | 02:47 | So you can see that, that really came into focus there.
| | 02:50 | So this is a really low number like 256.
| | 02:53 | Then it's going to be fast in the viewport,
but it's going to be fuzzy.
| | 02:57 | If it's a high value here, it's going to be
a better quality, but it will also be slower.
| | 03:02 | In other words, it might impact your performance.
| | 03:05 | What's happening behind the scenes here
is that the fractal noise texture, which
| | 03:10 | is a procedural pattern, is being rasterized.
| | 03:14 | It's being down-sampled before
it gets sent out to the video card.
| | 03:18 | The value here determines the resolution of
that texture that gets sent to the video card.
| | 03:23 | It does really need to be a power of two value,
in other words 256, 512, 1024, and so on.
| | 03:32 | If I move this slider here, I'm allowed
to choose random values, but I
| | 03:36 | really don't recommend that.
| | 03:37 | It really should be powers of 2.
| | 03:39 | Now you might be tempted to crank that
resolution all the way up to its maximum
| | 03:45 | of 2K or 2048 pixels.
| | 03:48 | But if you do that, you may
experience performance issues.
| | 03:52 | It actually took a moment
for Maya to think about that.
| | 03:56 | It had to actually calculate behind
the scenes, and in this case, I've got a
| | 04:01 | pretty trivial scene, and I've got a
pretty fast computer, so I am not noticing
| | 04:05 | a lot of performance degradation.
| | 04:07 | But I just want to mention I don't recommend
that you really ever turn that up to 2048.
| | 04:13 | I think the sweet spot is 512 or 1024.
| | 04:18 | So those are the options for a High Quality mode.
| | 04:20 | There's a third mode in here in the
Renderer menu here, and that's Viewport 2.0
| | 04:27 | and I'll activate that.
| | 04:29 | Viewport 2.0 is a newer Viewport Renderer,
and it can also be used for offline rendering.
| | 04:36 | In another words, you could do a batch
render that looks just like what you see
| | 04:40 | in the viewport, and that's a very fast renderer.
| | 04:43 | The Viewport 2.0 options will control
the quality of the texture and also
| | 04:48 | things like anti-aliasing.
| | 04:50 | If you look really closely around
the edges here, you may notice some
| | 04:53 | stair-stepping or some jagged edges.
| | 04:56 | We can improve that.
| | 04:57 | We can go into the Renderer menu to
Viewport 2.0, and choose the options there,
| | 05:04 | and we've got for example the
Color Texture resolution once again.
| | 05:10 | So I can crank that up to let's say 1024,
and getting closer, we can see the difference.
| | 05:15 | I'll click the button that says Re-bake All Textures.
| | 05:19 | By baking what is meant here is,
again, it's simply down-sampling or
| | 05:23 | rasterizing that texture before it gets
sent out to the video card, or the GPU.
| | 05:29 | I'll click on Re-bake All Textures, and
it thinks about it for a second and now
| | 05:34 | we've got a better quality display
there on that color texture.
| | 05:38 | Then also the other thing to look at is anti-aliasing.
| | 05:41 | So you can see there's a little bit
of jagged edges around here.
| | 05:45 | What I can do is go into a section
in the Hardware Renderer 2.0
| | 05:51 | Setting>Multisample Anti-aliasing,
open that up, and I can enable it.
| | 05:57 | What that does is it basically
smooths out the edges of objects.
| | 06:02 | I could increase the Sample Count too,
and that would really produce a very smooth result.
| | 06:07 | That would be perfect in fact if we wanted
to render this out using a batch render.
| | 06:12 | Well, those are our display options for the viewport.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using the Render view| 00:00 | As we work on Shader Networks, we
will need to do lots of test renders.
| | 00:05 | For that reason, we will need to get more
familiar with how the Render View works.
| | 00:10 | Our options for rendering the current
viewport are found up here on the Status
| | 00:15 | Line and we've got several
different variations on this clapboard.
| | 00:19 | The one on the far-right is the Render Settings window.
| | 00:22 | It's got two little dots next to it.
| | 00:24 | They are supposed to represent radio buttons.
| | 00:26 | When I click on that, it opens up the Render Settings.
| | 00:30 | Here I can choose which renderer I want to use
such as Maya software, and I
| | 00:34 | can choose things like the quality.
| | 00:37 | I will just leave that at Preview Quality currently.
| | 00:40 | Lots of other options in here,
such as whether Ray Tracing is turned on,
| | 00:44 | that we will be able to calculate
reflections and refractions.
| | 00:48 | I want to leave that off in this case.
| | 00:50 | So that's the Render Settings dialog,
and it includes things like, in the Common
| | 00:54 | Tab, if you want to save out a file,
what file format, and which camera, and
| | 01:00 | what resolution and so on.
| | 01:04 | To do a test render of the current view,
you can just click on the clapboard
| | 01:08 | that has nothing on it.
| | 01:09 | I'll click on that, and we'll get a
rendering, and that was pretty quick.
| | 01:14 | In that Render View, one of the most
useful things you can do is store the
| | 01:18 | current image in memory.
| | 01:20 | To do that, I can click here, Keep Image.
| | 01:23 | Once I click on that, now I get a
little bar down here, and I can keep doing
| | 01:29 | that when I render a new image.
| | 01:30 | I can keep it and click on Keep Image.
| | 01:33 | I can sort of move through the different
versions of my rendering and compare them.
| | 01:38 | To illustrate that, I am going to assign
a different material to my tablecloth.
| | 01:44 | So I will click on it to select it,
and then right-click, and choose Assign
| | 01:48 | Existing Material, one of these ones
that I've already got. Let's do crimson.
| | 01:52 | So now that new material has been applied.
| | 01:56 | I can do another rendering.
| | 01:57 | In the Render View here, I can just click the clapboard.
| | 02:01 | Now I've got a crimson version, and if I want,
I can store that by clicking Keep Image.
| | 02:07 | Now down here at the bottom, I've got
the little slider, and I can move that
| | 02:11 | back and forth to go through the
different renderings that I've created.
| | 02:15 | Notice by the way, that I've got two Crimson ones here.
| | 02:19 | This is just a little bit unexpected.
What you're seeing here is that once you
| | 02:24 | click Keep Image, you will actually
have two copies of that image.
| | 02:28 | The one that's visible when the slider
is on the very far-left is actually one
| | 02:34 | that's not really stored in RAM.
| | 02:37 | It's sort of stored in RAM, but not really.
| | 02:39 | So that's why you have sort of two of them here.
| | 02:41 | It's a bit confusing.
| | 02:42 | If I do another material, I can right-click
and choose Assign Existing Material,
| | 02:47 | and go to the fractal_blinn, and do another rendering.
| | 02:52 | Now you'll see that I don't have
two crimson ones anymore.
| | 02:56 | The one on the far-left is the most recent rendering.
| | 02:59 | Every one that's to the right of that
is one that's actually been kept or stored.
| | 03:04 | So if I want to keep that, I will click on Keep Image.
| | 03:07 | So that's how you can use the Render View
and compare different versions.
| | 03:12 | We can also use the Render View
to create what's called an Interactive
| | 03:16 | Production Rendering, and that will
use the current settings in the Render
| | 03:21 | Settings dialog, and it will re-render
the current image interactively.
| | 03:27 | That way, I can make changes to my
material and lighting and be able to see
| | 03:31 | those changes reflected immediately
in an almost perfect representation of what
| | 03:36 | it will look like when we do an actual batch render.
| | 03:40 | Let's close the dialog, and I'll reassign
one of my other materials.
| | 03:44 | It will just be faster performance if I use
a material that doesn't have a map.
| | 03:49 | I will choose Assign Existing Material.
| | 03:51 | I will go back to the green_lambert material.
| | 03:54 | I want to do an interactive production rendering.
| | 03:57 | So I can click here on the clapboard
that's labeled IPR, click on that.
| | 04:03 | If I'm using Maya software, it will
render the entire frame, and then I've
| | 04:08 | got a select part of the frame to update.
| | 04:11 | You will see it says Select a region to begin tuning.
| | 04:14 | I will need to drag a rectangle to select the
area that I want to re-render as I make changes.
| | 04:21 | So I will go back over into the main
viewport, and make sure that I've selected
| | 04:25 | my tablecloth and press Ctrl+A
to open up the Attribute Editor.
| | 04:29 | If you don't see the Shading Node,
which is green_lambert, you might need to
| | 04:32 | select one of these other tabs here
as you can see there are lots of them.
| | 04:36 | So you might need to tab over to find the Shading Node.
| | 04:40 | So if I make changes here such as the color,
you can see that, that's updating
| | 04:44 | immediately in the Interactive
Production Renderer. Very useful!
| | 04:49 | If you've got textures, you're probably
going to want to disable textures in the
| | 04:54 | viewport, or, if you've got complicated
shader or perhaps if you're using High
| | 04:59 | Quality mode, I would recommend that
you set your viewport to a Wireframe mode
| | 05:05 | while you're doing an interactive production rendering.
| | 05:09 | So I could click over here to give
focus to that, and press 4 to show just
| | 05:14 | wires in that view, and reselect the object.
| | 05:18 | That's just going to give me faster performance
in the Interactive Production Rendering.
| | 05:22 | I can also create an IPR render directly from here.
| | 05:25 | So I can click in the Render View.
| | 05:28 | The same process applies;
| | 05:29 | I drag a rectangle and then I can make adjustments.
| | 05:33 | The Maya Software IPR does not support Ray Tracing.
| | 05:38 | So if you've got ray traced reflections
or refractions or ray traced shadows in
| | 05:43 | your scene, then in fact, the IPR will
not work at all with Maya software.
| | 05:50 | That is a major limitation in IPR.
| | 05:52 | However, the workaround is to use mental ray.
| | 05:55 | I can choose a different renderer from here,
or from within the Render Settings dialog.
| | 06:00 | If I choose mental ray, and click IPR,
then it's actually better additionally
| | 06:07 | because it doesn't have to render the
entire frame first, it just shows it in
| | 06:12 | wireframe, and then I get to draw a
rectangle and that will update now
| | 06:16 | as I make these changes.
| | 06:18 | Mental ray IPR does support ray tracing.
| | 06:21 | So if you've got reflections, refractions
or ray traced shadows and you want to
| | 06:27 | test them out in IPR, then you will
need to use mental ray to do that.
| | 06:32 | One final note, we can open up the Render View
without actually executing a new render.
| | 06:38 | Sometimes renderings will take a really
long time, and you don't want to create
| | 06:42 | a new render, you just want to open up the window.
| | 06:45 | You do that by clicking on this
clapboard that's got a box around;
| | 06:48 | that's supposed to represent the dialog box itself.
| | 06:51 | I will click on that and it simply opens the
Render View without doing a new rendering.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Graphing networks| 00:00 | To work in Hypershade you'll need to
graph the networks of your materials.
| | 00:06 | Let's go ahead and open up a Hypershade.
| | 00:08 | Window>Rendering Editors>Hypershade.
| | 00:11 | You will see in this scene I have got lots of materials.
| | 00:14 | You will notice by the way, that some of
these are in red and that's an indicator
| | 00:19 | actually that those materials cannot
be rendered using the current renderer.
| | 00:24 | In fact, these are all in this case, mental ray
materials and my current renderer
| | 00:30 | is Maya software and these are
not renderable in Maya software.
| | 00:36 | That's why they're highlighting in red.
| | 00:38 | So don't let that disturb you.
| | 00:40 | It's not going to affect our lesson here.
| | 00:42 | In fact, later what we'll do is
we'll put those into their own bins.
| | 00:45 | So we can filter the view here so we
don't see those if we don't want to.
| | 00:50 | So let's graph a network.
| | 00:52 | There's multiple ways to do that.
| | 00:54 | One way is to simply select a material
in this tab here and graph the network
| | 01:01 | directly by right-clicking and choosing Graph Network.
| | 01:06 | Now you can see all of the shading
nodes that make up that shader.
| | 01:11 | It's got a texture placement, it's got
a procedural texture, a bump node that
| | 01:15 | creates the roughness, and then the material itself.
| | 01:19 | That's one simple way to graph a network.
| | 01:22 | We can also graph networks
on selected objects in the scene.
| | 01:27 | If I select the tablecloth for example,
and then in Hypershade I can go up here
| | 01:33 | and there is a button that says
Graph materials on selected objects.
| | 01:39 | I can do that from the menus up here,
too, Graph materials on selected objects.
| | 01:44 | But I usually use the button,
because it's much quicker.
| | 01:47 | So I will click on that.
| | 01:48 | Now we see the Shader Network for the
tablecloth and it's a little bit more involved.
| | 01:53 | By the way, we will learn all about
how to build these networks and what all
| | 01:57 | these nodes mean later.
| | 01:58 | So don't panic just yet.
| | 02:00 | It's not really necessary for you to understand
at this point what all these things are, what they do.
| | 02:05 | We just want to learn first how to graph networks.
| | 02:08 | So that's another way we can graph a network.
| | 02:11 | We have got stuff here in our work area.
| | 02:14 | If I selected a node here and deleted it
to clear the graph out, I would
| | 02:19 | actually delete the node from my scene.
| | 02:22 | So if I press the Delete key on the keyboard
here now that's broken my scene.
| | 02:27 | The tablecloth turns this sort of forced
green color and that's actually a
| | 02:32 | visual indicator that the object
has no material assigned to it.
| | 02:37 | As such it's not renderable at all.
| | 02:40 | So I don't want to delete nodes
from the work area here.
| | 02:44 | Let me undo that, and instead of deleting,
if I need to clear this out I have got
| | 02:50 | a button up here, Clear Graph and I
just wipes out the work area without
| | 02:55 | deleting any of those nodes.
| | 02:56 | Let me maximize the Hypershade so
we can have a little bit more space.
| | 03:02 | You can also graph networks on
multiple materials at the same time.
| | 03:09 | For example, if I select the tablecloth
and then Shift+Select this lemon
| | 03:13 | material, I can go up here and I can
click on this button here, Input and
| | 03:20 | output connections.
| | 03:22 | What that's going to do is it's
going to show all of the nodes that are
| | 03:26 | connected to those selected materials.
| | 03:29 | So click on Input and output and now we see all of this.
| | 03:34 | We can move these around, we can select
these and move them and just organize this.
| | 03:42 | Sometimes things will get a little messed up.
| | 03:45 | You can just clear this up and tidy it up
by clicking up here on Rearrange Graph.
| | 03:52 | I will click on that and now everything's
been made neat and tidy once again.
| | 03:57 | If I want clear that out again,
I can just click Clear Graph.
| | 04:02 | So I can select multiple materials at once
and see all of their shader trees or
| | 04:08 | shader networks by clicking on
Input and output connections.
| | 04:13 | For example, I can click on apple_blinn
here or I can click on this drapery.
| | 04:19 | I can Shift+Click to select those both
and then display both of their graphs.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Understanding shading groups| 00:00 | Maya collects all of the objects that
share a single material into something
| | 00:06 | called a Shading Group and you
just need to understand what that is.
| | 00:11 | So let's open up the Hypershade and take a look at it,
| | 00:14 | Window>Rendering Editors>Hypershade.
| | 00:15 | Now the apple_blinn material here is
currently assigned to both of the apples.
| | 00:24 | If I select that and then graph its
network by right-clicking and choosing
| | 00:30 | Graph Network, you'll see all the
shading notes including once again the
| | 00:35 | texture placement, the fractal noise
and some other cool stuff you'll learn about
| | 00:40 | later in the course.
| | 00:41 | But these are all the material shading
nodes that go into this shader network
| | 00:46 | or composed at shader tree.
| | 00:49 | But when we graph the network in that way,
we don't see the Shading Group.
| | 00:53 | And to see that Shading Group what I can do
is I can click on the material here
| | 00:59 | in the tab and then click on Input and output
connections on the Hypershade
| | 01:06 | toolbar, click on that.
| | 01:08 | And it graphs the same network, except
this time we see something that says blinn2SG.
| | 01:14 | That's a Shading Group;
| | 01:16 | SG stands for a Shading Group.
| | 01:18 | It says blinn2 because I didn't rename it.
I renamed the material but the
| | 01:22 | Shading Group doesn't rename itself automatically.
| | 01:26 | So that's a collection of all the objects
and materials that are shared, in
| | 01:32 | other words all the objects that
have a certain material applied to them.
| | 01:36 | Let me just minimize this material tab
a little bit so we can see a bit better.
| | 01:43 | What I am going to do is, I am going
to select the blinn2SG node and I'm go
| | 01:49 | back up here again and click on Input
and output connections because what
| | 01:54 | I want you to see when I click that is
that a Hypergraph and Hypershade are
| | 02:01 | actually really the same thing. You
might be familiar with Maya's Hypergraph,
| | 02:05 | it lets you see connections between
all the nodes in your scene or something
| | 02:10 | called the Maya Mantra, it's a saying
that goes Maya is a network of nodes that
| | 02:16 | are interconnected.
| | 02:18 | So everything in Maya is a node
and everything in Maya is a node that's
| | 02:22 | connected to some other node; there's
no standalone node that's just naked and
| | 02:26 | not connected to anything.
| | 02:28 | When we graph the input and output
connections on a Shading Group in the
| | 02:33 | Hypershade, we can see things that are not materials.
| | 02:37 | For example, the apple object is listed
here, it's a NURBS surface shape and here
| | 02:44 | is the other one apple_02.
| | 02:46 | You'll see it's also connected
to something called a light linker and
| | 02:49 | something called a render partition.
| | 02:52 | So the Shading Group in Maya is kind
of like a clearinghouse, it's a way of
| | 02:57 | collecting all of these things and
putting all these different node types into a
| | 03:02 | single container. That allows us to
assign the material to multiple objects
| | 03:08 | and have it be lit by lights in
the scene; that is a Shading Group.
If you go to the Shading Groups tab,
here you'll see them all listed here.
| | 03:18 | So for each material I've
made I have got a Shading Group.
| | 03:22 | That's all we need is see here. We just
need to understand what a Shading Group is.
| | 03:27 | It becomes important later on if you
want to work with displacement mapping and
| | 03:30 | other advanced techniques.
| | 03:32 | We'll look at that later in the course.
| | 03:34 | But for now it's sufficient for you
to understand that a Shading Group
| | 03:38 | is a collection of all objects and materials
that are shared in your scene.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Making and breaking connections| 00:00 | We've seen how to connect shader
nodes and texture nodes by middle-mouse
| | 00:05 | dragging into the Attribute Editor.
| | 00:07 | We also need to know how to do
that from within Hypershade itself.
| | 00:11 | Let's go in to the Hypershade window.
I'll create a new material for the
| | 00:18 | tablecloth here; click on Blinn, and
let's rename it. I can do that from the
| | 00:24 | channel box or the attribute editor.
I'll just call this tablecloth_new_blinn.
| | 00:31 | I'll create a texture node. I will
go into the 2D textures and let's try a
| | 00:37 | Cloth texture, click on that
and that's a procedural texture.
| | 00:41 | I'll rearrange the graph, clean that up.
| | 00:43 | I'll use Alt and middle-mouse to navigate
and Alt and right-mouse, just like you
| | 00:49 | would have in the viewports.
| | 00:51 | I want to connect the color of this cloth texture
to the diffuse color of my shader here.
| | 00:58 | To do that in the Hypershade we want
to use these little arrows down here at
| | 01:02 | the bottom of each node.
| | 01:05 | On the right-hand side is the output
and on the left-hand side is the input.
| | 01:11 | To make the connection I'll go to
what's going to be the input node,
| | 01:14 | the think that's going to be feeding.
| | 01:16 | So in this case the cloth is going be
the input node relative to the material.
| | 01:24 | I'll go to the lower right-hand corner
to its output and right-click and
| | 01:29 | choose the attribute that I want to send.
| | 01:32 | In this case it's going to be the outColor.
| | 01:35 | I am going to choose outColor>outColor.
| | 01:38 | That's all three red, green, blue color components in one.
| | 01:43 | When I release my right mouse button and
move the mouse around I get a wire and
| | 01:48 | it's not connected to anything yet.
| | 01:49 | Then I want to go to the Destination node
and left-mouse click on the lower left
| | 01:56 | hand corner of the Destination node
and that's its input.
| | 01:59 | So I'll left-click on that and choose
the property that I want to map and in
| | 02:05 | this case it's going to be the color or the diffuse color.
| | 02:09 | When I release the mouse that connection has been made.
| | 02:12 | I can see that if I'd been middle-mouse drag
the material onto the object,
| | 02:17 | and you can see now I've got a cloth texture on there.
| | 02:21 | That's how we can make a connection.
| | 02:23 | Now let's talk about breaking connections.
We can break connections by just
| | 02:27 | selecting the wire itself.
| | 02:30 | If it's not selected the wire will show in green
if it's a single connection.
| | 02:36 | If it's a multi-connection like we see
here, if I hover my mouse over that, it's
| | 02:41 | showing that you have multiple connections.
| | 02:42 | It's showing as a thicker line in Orange.
That's an indicator that that's
| | 02:47 | more than one connection there.
| | 02:49 | This thin one here is a single connection.
| | 02:52 | So if I want to delete that I'll select it
to highlight it and press the Delete
| | 02:56 | key on the keyboard.
| | 02:57 | I want to make sure that I don't have
the node itself selected when I press
| | 03:02 | Delete, of course, because
then I'll blow that node away.
| | 03:06 | Now we can also break connections
in the Attribute Editor too.
| | 03:10 | Let me select that material node and go
to Ctrl+A Attributes and I rebuild that
| | 03:16 | connection like I did before; right-click,
outColor>outColor, left-click and
| | 03:22 | connect that to color and now
the connection has been made.
| | 03:26 | I can also break the connection
from the Attribute Editor.
| | 03:30 | If I go over to any one of these mapped
attributes, I can right-click on the
| | 03:34 | name, not the swatch and not this button,
not the slider, but the name.
| | 03:40 | I'll right-click on that and choose Break Connection.
| | 03:45 | That's the same as if I deleted the wire over here.
| | 03:48 | It's important to realize that when you
break a connection through the Attribute
| | 03:52 | Editor, you're not deleting the map.
| | 03:54 | You are not deleting the texture that's
feeding into the Attribute that you just broke.
| | 04:00 | So the cloth node still exists in my scene
and it can still be accessed from the
| | 04:06 | Hypershade and it can still be reconnected
in the same way that we have done
| | 04:11 | before, either using the right-mouse
button here or using the middle-mouse
| | 04:15 | button and dragging to the Attribute Editor.
That's how we can make and break
| | 04:20 | connections in a Hypershade.
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| Using the Connection Editor| 00:00 | Another way to make connections is to
use the Connection Editor and sometimes
| | 00:06 | you'll need to do that.
| | 00:07 | So let's open up the Hypershade and take
a look at how to make connections using
| | 00:13 | the Connection Editor.
| | 00:16 | So I've got that simple table cloth material
that I made previously. I can
| | 00:22 | right-click and graph it's network down here.
Let's just minimize some of these
| | 00:26 | other panels so we can kind of focus in on this.
| | 00:30 | And another way that I can make connections
is through the Connection Editor.
| | 00:34 | If I delete this connection here I can
select that wire and press Delete.
| | 00:39 | Now there's no connection currently.
| | 00:41 | Sometimes when you left-click on your
Destination node the attribute that you
| | 00:45 | want to map to isn't found.
| | 00:47 | The ones that I want are all here right now,
but for the sake of argument
| | 00:52 | some times you will not be a will find
what you want here, it's just not listed.
| | 00:56 | In that case you want to choose Other.
| | 00:59 | When you release the mouse on that,
the Connection Editor opens
| | 01:03 | automatically and it loads those two nodes in.
| | 01:07 | On the left is the Source or the Input
node and on the right is the Destination.
| | 01:15 | We can make connections here.
| | 01:18 | What I want to connect is just the color,
like we did before, and this is called
| | 01:23 | outColor in this case.
| | 01:25 | Some of them by the way have sub
attributes within them, if you click on the
| | 01:29 | little (+) plus sign you'll see. If I wanted to
I could connect just the red,
| | 01:34 | green or blue, but in this case I want
to connect all three so I'll click on the
| | 01:38 | root of that outColor.
| | 01:40 | As soon as I do that a lot of stuff over
here on the destination side is
| | 01:44 | grayed out, meaning that it's not possible
for me to make that connection over here.
| | 01:50 | I can only connect an outColor to
another attribute that has three values.
| | 01:57 | In Maya that's called a vector attribute.
It's got three components, in this case a
| | 02:02 | red, green and blue.
| | 02:03 | Over here I want to connect to just to color.
| | 02:07 | Again, if I open that up you will see
I have got color red, green and blue.
| | 02:11 | Again, those are not legal to make
connections to because this is a
| | 02:15 | three-value attribute and these are one-value attributes.
| | 02:19 | But if I click on color here now, that
creates the connection and you can see it here.
| | 02:25 | So in Maya, in a lot of these editors
like the Connection Editor, the way that
| | 02:30 | you make connections is by simply clicking on
the attribute and that creates the connection.
| | 02:37 | You don't select it and then press a button
to make the connection.
| | 02:41 | The selection is the connection.
| | 02:45 | If I click again, then I break that connection.
| | 02:48 | You can see it happen here in the Hypershade window.
| | 02:51 | Once again, I'll just select the outColor over
here and click on Color on the
| | 02:57 | Destination node and that creates the connection.
| | 03:00 | Again, if click again, that will break the connection.
| | 03:04 | Now I could connect to multiple attributes at ones,
it's not a one-to-one correspondence.
| | 03:10 | I could take the outColor and
connect it to multiple things.
| | 03:13 | For example, I could connect it to
the straight up color which is the
| | 03:17 | diffuse color, I could also connect
it to transparency as well, and you can
| | 03:20 | see transparency here.
| | 03:23 | Reading this out I can tell that outColor
is currently connected to both color
| | 03:28 | and transparency and if I don't want that,
again I can click on it to break the connection.
| | 03:35 | You can also launch the Connection Editor separately.
| | 03:38 | We could go into
Window>General Editors>Connection Editor.
| | 03:44 | But when we do it this way it won't load the
nodes in and we will need to do that by hand.
| | 03:49 | So I can select what I want to be the
source node and then click Reload.
| | 03:56 | I can choose the node that I want to be
the destination and click Reload over here.
| | 04:02 | Now I can go ahead and make
or break those connections.
| | 04:05 | By the way, you can see that this is in
Italics and that's an indicator that some
| | 04:10 | connection is made here in this node.
| | 04:13 | In order to find out what that connection is
we have to select it and then the
| | 04:18 | thing that is actually connected will be highlighted.
| | 04:22 | Once again I can go back to making
and breaking by simply clicking.
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| Organizing material libraries with bins| 00:00 | When you build up a material library
as I've done here, you might want to
| | 00:05 | consider organizing your library
using bins and the Hypershade.
| | 00:09 | So open the Hypershade, Window>Rendering
Editors>Hypershade, and as I mentioned
| | 00:15 | previously, you'll see that there are a
lot of these that are in red, those are
| | 00:19 | mental ray materials, we just maximize the Hypershade.
| | 00:24 | These mental ray materials will only
render in mental ray and if I know that
| | 00:28 | I'm not going to use any of those it
might be a good idea for me to put them
| | 00:33 | into their own bin.
| | 00:34 | You can use bins to organize your materials
by whatever category you want.
| | 00:38 | Over here on the left-hand pane
of the Hypershade we've so far only been
| | 00:42 | using the Create tab. We can go to Bins
and this is basically a way of filtering
| | 00:49 | the display of the main tab over here.
| | 00:52 | So everything is in the Master Bin.
| | 00:54 | Let's just make this a little bit wider here.
| | 00:58 | If I click on Master Bin I don't see any change here
because everything is in the Master Bin.
| | 01:03 | Well let's make a new bin.
| | 01:06 | So we can go ahead up here, so we can just
click to create an empty bin for example.
| | 01:10 | So I'll click on that and give it a name
I'll call that one mental_ray, and now I
| | 01:18 | have got a sub bin inside the Master Bin.
| | 01:21 | I can just middle-mouse drag
materials over into here, so I can middle
| | 01:25 | mouse drag this, boom!
| | 01:27 | So now, that molding material has
been placed into the mental_ray bin.
| | 01:32 | If I click on the mental_ray bin,
it's going to filter the display over
| | 01:37 | here and that's important that you
understand that; that the bins are just a way
| | 01:42 | all of choosing which of the materials
you want to see. It's not actually
| | 01:49 | removing them from the scene or
putting them into any kind of container.
| | 01:53 | It's really just a display filter.
| | 01:55 | Now if I click back on Master Bin we will see all of them.
| | 01:59 | If I want to add the rest of these
mental_ray materials, I can hold down
| | 02:03 | Shift and select all these that have a
red border and then middle-mouse drag
| | 02:08 | those into the mental_ray bin.
| | 02:10 | Then click on mental_ray bin and
you can see that they're all included.
| | 02:14 | Go back to the Master Bin and maybe
I'll make a bin that only includes the
| | 02:19 | Maya software compatible shaders.
| | 02:22 | So I can do that in one fell swoop by
selecting all of these with the Shift key
| | 02:27 | and select everything that's not displayed
in red here, those are all the Maya
| | 02:33 | compatible materials.
| | 02:35 | I can create a new bin including the selected nodes.
| | 02:39 | So I will click Create bin from selected
and then give that a name, and I'll call
| | 02:45 | that one Maya shaders.
| | 02:47 | So I know those ones will render
in Maya software and click OK.
| | 02:52 | Now to filter the display to see only
the Maya compatible shaders, I can
| | 02:57 | just click on the maya_shaders bin and there you go.
| | 03:01 | Now that doesn't mean that I don't have
any mental_ray nodes here in my material
| | 03:06 | library. It just means that I have
temporarily hidden them and I am only
| | 03:10 | displaying the materials in that current bin.
| | 03:13 | That's the basic introduction to how
you can use the Hypershade interface
| | 03:20 | to make/break connections and organize your work.
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|
|
2. Essential TechniquesIntroducing the Node Editor| 00:00 | In this chapter we'll look at a lot of
essential techniques for building and
| | 00:04 | editing shader networks.
| | 00:06 | Before we leap into that I just want to
show you a very cool, newish tool in MAYA
| | 00:13 | called the Node Editor.
| | 00:15 | It could be used instead of the Hypershade, if you prefer.
| | 00:19 | Let's go into the Node Editor, it's under
Window>Node Editor, open that up.
| | 00:25 | By default its going to be blank.
I can create nodes in here.
| | 00:30 | I have to know the name of the node first.
| | 00:32 | So if I want to create a node I can
press the Tab key and I've got to actually
| | 00:36 | type in the name of the node I'm looking for.
| | 00:38 | If I want to create a Blinn node,
I can type in b-l-i and there it is Blinn.
| | 00:45 | I select it and press the Enter key
and the Blinn Shading Node is created
| | 00:50 | and you'll see there is also a shading group created.
| | 00:53 | Likewise, if I want to make a file Node, I could
press the Tab key and type in the word file.
| | 01:00 | You could see here there's different
types of file I want a texture files so
| | 01:03 | click on file (Texture) and press Enter.
| | 01:07 | Now just as we had created file
textures in the hyper shade we've now got a
| | 01:13 | file texture here, in the Node Editor.
Its created text replacement node, too.
| | 01:17 | If want to browse for a file, I could
select that node and open the Attribute
| | 01:21 | Editor with Ctrl+A, and then choose the File.
| | 01:25 | For example, this masonry file, and click Open.
| | 01:29 | Now I've got a few nodes in the Node Editor.
| | 01:31 | I can connect them pretty easily.
| | 01:34 | You'll see these circles here, these ports that
can use to connect different attributes.
| | 01:41 | In order to see more clearly what I'm doing,
I want to expand the display of the Nodes.
| | 01:46 | So I can for example, select these
two Nodes here and click up here on the
| | 01:51 | toolbar to change the display.
| | 01:54 | I can click on this middle button here,
and that shows me a lot of the attributes.
| | 02:00 | I click on this third button, now I cam
see pretty much all of the attributes.
| | 02:05 | If I want to connect the color of this
file to the color of the Blinn, I'll just
| | 02:10 | left-click on Out Color here, and
then drag over to Color on the Blinn node.
| | 02:16 | Now that connection has been made.
| | 02:18 | Even if the nodes are minimized, I can
hover the mouse over the connection.
| | 02:23 | I should be able to see a little Tool Tip;
| | 02:26 | that tells me what that connection is.
| | 02:29 | I can clear the Graph and that won't
delete these nodes, they're still going
| | 02:33 | to be in the scene.
| | 02:34 | Let me just go ahead and click on Clear the
Graph here and that'll just clean that up.
| | 02:39 | If I want to edit an existing Shader Network,
I can, for example, select an object
| | 02:45 | in the Viewport, and then in the Node Editor
right-click and choose
| | 02:51 | Graph Materials on Viewport Selection.
| | 02:54 | Anything that's currently selected will be
graphed in the Node Editor. And there you go.
| | 02:59 | There is a shading network for the table cloth.
| | 03:03 | The Node Editor is very flexible tool.
It can be used for making and
| | 03:08 | breaking connections between all
sorts of nodes, not just material Nodes.
| | 03:14 | That's a basic introduction to the Node Editor.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a matte painting with the surface shader| 00:00 | One of the most basic things you'll need
to do in terms of Building Materials in
| | 00:04 | Maya is to construct a Matte Painting.
| | 00:06 | And a Matte Painting is usually a flat backdrop
that represents something more complex.
| | 00:12 | In other words, it would be difficult
for me to build an entire scene with lots
| | 00:16 | and lots of foliage and mountains
and trees outside the window here.
| | 00:21 | To save myself the trouble of having to
build all that I can just use a photograph.
| | 00:25 | In order for that to work right the
Matte Painting has to be fully self
| | 00:30 | illuminated, it can't be affected
by the lighting in the scene.
| | 00:33 | And it also needs to perfectly face
the camera so that we don't get any
| | 00:37 | perspective distortion on that Matte Painting.
| | 00:41 | We're going to do a little bit of non-Shader
work here to make that happen.
| | 00:44 | We're going to create a plane in the front viewport.
Go to Create menu and choose
| | 00:49 | Polygon Primitives>Plane,
and draw that out in the front view.
| | 00:54 | I already know the aspect ratio of the image
that I've chosen to place onto the surface.
| | 00:59 | I made a panorama that has an aspect of 2.26 to 1.
| | 01:04 | So that my material doesn't stretch
funny across the object here, I want to make
| | 01:10 | that object the same aspect ratio as the image.
| | 01:13 | I will give it a width of 226 and a
height of 100 here in those polyPlane
| | 01:21 | Shape Node Attributes.
| | 01:22 | Now it's the right shape, I just want
to scale it up a bit, so that's the
| | 01:27 | right size, scale that up equally, and
then I just want to move it back so that
| | 01:33 | it's outside the window.
| | 01:34 | So that's basically positioned.
| | 01:37 | Before I put any kind of material on this
however there is a quirky little
| | 01:42 | attribute, we'll need to deal with
over here back in the INPUT node.
| | 01:47 | It's the Create UVs attribute.
| | 01:49 | By default what Maya does is
it stretches the UVs on your object,
| | 01:55 | in order to assume a square aspect.
| | 01:58 | In another words, Maya assumes that the texture
that I am going to place on here is a square.
| | 02:04 | However as we know, it isn't square.
My image is an aspect of 2.26.
| | 02:10 | For that to stretch properly across
that surface, I'll need to change the
| | 02:13 | Create UVs option here to Normalization off.
| | 02:18 | If normalization is on, it will stretch
the UVs to a square. If Normalization is
| | 02:23 | off, it will stretch the UVs to fit the object.
So that's good.
| | 02:28 | Now I also want to cause the Matte Painting
to face the camera, and to do that
| | 02:33 | I'll use an Aim constraint.
| | 02:35 | I'll select the camera first, and then Shift
select the matte painting. I want to be
| | 02:41 | in the Animation menu set,
and go to Constrain>Aim>Options.
| | 02:48 | Now I am going to just choose the
default options here but I will need to change
| | 02:53 | those up in the Attribute Editor in a moment.
| | 02:55 | I'll just show you what happens if I use
the default options and click Add.
| | 02:59 | Now the plane is facing towards the camera,
but it's not the axis that we want.
| | 03:04 | We actually want the local Z axis
of the plane to point at the camera.
| | 03:08 | I'll go to the Attribute Editor to change up
those Aim Constrain attributes;
| | 03:12 | Ctrl+A, go to the Aim Constrain node
and in the Aim Constrain Attributes I want
| | 03:19 | to set the Aim vector to a value of 1
in Z, I'll set the X value to 0 and Z
| | 03:27 | value to 1, and then additionally
just to be sure that this works right,
| | 03:32 | I want to set the World Up Type to Scene Up.
| | 03:35 | That probably fine in this case,
but I just want to make sure.
| | 03:38 | Good, so now that's facing towards the
camera and you'll see if I move it,
| | 03:44 | it's always going to make the.
| | 03:45 | We won't get any perspective
distortion through this camera's lens.
| | 03:48 | So we got our Matte Painting in there, and
now we are just ready to add the material.
| | 03:53 | This is a really simple one it's a Surface Shader.
| | 03:56 | The Surface Shader in Maya does not
react to light, and it's perfectly self
| | 04:00 | illuminated, and if you use the default
Maya software renderer the pixel
| | 04:04 | brightness of the Surface Shader
will be exactly the same brightness as
| | 04:09 | your original texture.
| | 04:11 | I'll right-click on that plane and choose
Assign New Material, and I want to
| | 04:17 | chooses Surface Shader. In the Attitude
Editor I can go to the Out Color here,
| | 04:23 | click on the Create Render Node button
and its going to be a File node. Click on
| | 04:28 | File in the create Render Node dialog.
| | 04:32 | Now I've got the File attributes
and I'll need to browse for that file by
| | 04:36 | clicking below folder icon.
| | 04:37 | And here it is, pointLobos_panorama1,
go ahead and click Open.
| | 04:43 | Now that Surface Shader is applied and
if we're seeing shading in our main view port
| | 04:48 | we'll see that there's some image there.
| | 04:50 | Remember 4 is wireframe frame, 5 is
shaded and 6 is shaded and textured.
| | 04:58 | We haven't dealt with the quality here
but we will do that in another movie.
| | 05:03 | We're just going to change that quality
so we can see that little the better.
| | 05:06 | Before we wrap up this movie however
I just want to do little a bit of cleanup,
| | 05:11 | I want to rename plane here, I'll call it mattePainting.
| | 05:14 | Finally I want to save to a new file name.
The one I've currently got open
| | 05:18 | is still_life_geometry_only, but now
I've added the mattePaintings so I just
| | 05:22 | want to save to a new version.
File>Save Scene As and I'll call it
| | 05:27 | still_life_geometry_and_mattePainting
so I know that one is a different version.
| | 05:38 | So we have got our matte painting in there
and in a while we will adjust the quality in the viewports.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Controlling hardware texture quality| 00:00 | We've got a Matte Painting here in our still life scene.
| | 00:03 | As you can see through the camera view here,
we're not getting very good quality
| | 00:08 | to the texture in this shaded and textured view.
| | 00:12 | Of course, I can change the Renderer in
the Viewport and that'll probably give me
| | 00:15 | a better approximation of what
that texture really looks like.
| | 00:19 | I can go into Renderer>High-Quality.
| | 00:21 | You can see that looks quite a bit better or if I go
into Renderer Viewport 2.0, that also looks okay.
| | 00:30 | However you can't always use those
display modes, sometimes you actually need
| | 00:34 | to be in default mode.
| | 00:35 | I want to go back to Renderer Default Quality Rendering.
| | 00:39 | Let me just show you how to change the quality
of the Hardware Texturing on a per shader basis.
| | 00:45 | You can select your object and go to
the Attribute Editor Ctrl+A. And in that
| | 00:52 | shading node here in surfaceShader1,
you'll see there's Hardware Texturing.
| | 00:55 | Let me open that up.
| | 01:00 | I can change the texture resolution
here to the Highest Quality.
| | 01:04 | Now we're getting a much better approximation,
even in the default Render mode.
| | 01:10 | Now I can actually see that through the
window, I can line up my Matte painting,
| | 01:15 | so that it looks good from the camera's point of view.
| | 01:19 | That's all there is to adjusting the Hardware
Texturing options for the Default Render Quality.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Lighting the scene| 00:00 | It's difficult to evaluate the quality
of your Shader work if you're just using
| | 00:05 | the default lighting.
| | 00:06 | What I like to do is set up my lighting
at least a basic first pass of the
| | 00:10 | lighting, before I start working on the materials.
| | 00:14 | That way I kind of know what the
materials will look like in the final shot.
| | 00:18 | What we will do here is just create
some area lights to light the interior of a
| | 00:23 | little still life tabletop.
| | 00:25 | And then we will save those lights out
to their own scene files so that they can
| | 00:29 | be referenced in, or the
reference disabled if needed.
| | 00:32 | We are going to Create menu
and choose Lights>Area Light.
| | 00:38 | The Area Light is created at
the origin, but it's very small.
| | 00:42 | I will need to scale it up.
| | 00:44 | I got my Scale tool and scale up, in this case,
to a factor of about 80. I just
| | 00:52 | want to in position it, grab the Move tool,
and move it up, move it back and
| | 00:57 | tilted at angle so it's facing towards my shot.
| | 01:02 | Then I want to of course enable lighting
in the camera view, you can
| | 01:06 | activate that and press the '7' key to
see the lighting then as I rotate my Area
| | 01:12 | Light around we can see the effect.
| | 01:13 | If we want to better approximation,
of course, we can go to render
| | 01:18 | high-quality rendering, that will
actually show us a better idea of what it
| | 01:23 | will look like when it's rendered.
| | 01:26 | That's one Area Light that will be my key light.
| | 01:28 | I am going to set its Intensity down a bit,
because I just know it's going to be too much.
| | 01:33 | So I'll set that Intensity down to about .25.
| | 01:38 | It looks kind of dark here, but if
I do a quick render, you just see that
| | 01:44 | it's actually considerably brighter.
| | 01:48 | I just want to duplicate that so
select that and just hit Ctrl+D to get
| | 01:53 | another one, move it over. That will
be my fill light, and rotate around.
| | 02:01 | So it's facing basically downward
onto the scene. Since that's the fill
| | 02:06 | light it doesn't need to be as intense.
| | 02:08 | So I set this Intensity down to, let's
say .01; go back to my high-quality
| | 02:13 | rendering here, still looks a bit dark,
but again if I do a render, it's about
| | 02:18 | the right Intensity now.
| | 02:21 | Now I also need a light that's shining
through the window that represents the
| | 02:24 | light coming from outdoors.
| | 02:26 | Go ahead and select one of these,
Ctrl+D to do another one, make a new
| | 02:32 | duplicate, move that around and I want
to rotate that, in fact, I want to make sure that
| | 02:38 | the arrow is pointing towards the scene here.
| | 02:43 | So now that I kind of know what
that's going to be, I can set the rotation
| | 02:47 | values properly, I know that rotate x
wants to be -180, and looks like rotate Z
| | 02:55 | also wants to be -180.
| | 02:59 | Now it squared up to my scene, and I want
to just Scale it so that it's about the
| | 03:04 | right size for that window.
| | 03:07 | I'll set the Scale-X and Z to about 80,
but Scale-Y let me set that to about 100,
| | 03:13 | so it's taller, I just want to make sure
that it kind of fits through the
| | 03:17 | window, get a little bit closer there.
| | 03:20 | So that's the light that's coming through the window now.
| | 03:24 | So when I rotate value 0 here, and then
the Intensity on that one, I don't know
| | 03:31 | exactly what that's going to be,
but I'll leave it at .01 right now.
| | 03:35 | Give that a shot; see what it looks like when I render.
| | 03:39 | So without any shadows it's kind of difficult
to evaluate but we have got the basics in here.
| | 03:44 | Go back to this light and I want
to enable Ray Trace shadows.
| | 03:48 | We go down here to use Ray Trace
shadows and turn that on, type in a 1.
| | 03:52 | Probably I want to do the same for all
these actually, they should all cast shadows.
| | 03:57 | Do another quick rendering, it's
going to be bit grainy, because with the
| | 04:09 | AreaLights I need to increase the quality of the shadows.
| | 04:13 | Additionally if you do render and you
don't see those shadows, remember that you
| | 04:16 | will need to go into your Render settings window
under Maya software and just make
| | 04:21 | sure that Ray-tracing is turned on.
| | 04:26 | So back to my attributes; I just want
to select one of these hit Ctrl+A to get
| | 04:31 | the Attribute Editor open.
| | 04:32 | Go into the Shadows section here,
and under Ray Trace shadows just
| | 04:37 | increase the Shadow rays to about 20.
| | 04:40 | That will fight that graininess, just
want to do that for all three of those.
| | 04:47 | Maybe we reduce the Intensity of
the key light a little bit while I'm here,
| | 04:51 | set that down to maybe 0.2 instead of .25.
| | 04:56 | Go ahead and render that and you will
see that it takes longer with the Shadows,
| | 05:01 | but they will be much higher quality.
| | 05:03 | Okay, that's finished rendering. It actually
took about one minute to render with
| | 05:07 | those Ray trace shadows, but it looks okay.
| | 05:09 | I am going to go-ahead and now save
those lights out to their own scene file.
| | 05:13 | I want to select those three lights. I want
to create a layer for them, my layer
| | 05:19 | Editor. Go ahead and click on create
layer with the selected objects; there is
| | 05:25 | my new layer, I'll double-click on that;
I'll change this and we'll call it,
| | 05:29 | lights_interior layer.
| | 05:32 | So I probably have a setup
for exterior lighting later.
| | 05:35 | Lights_interior_layer, that's good.
They're still selected and I want to go ahead
| | 05:40 | and save those out to their own file.
| | 05:42 | File>Export Selection and I want to
call this one still_life_lights_interior_01,
| | 05:52 | because I might have more than one version.
| | 05:55 | I am saving that as in Maya ASCII scene file.
Click on Export.
| | 06:03 | Now finally, and somewhat
unexpectedly, I am going to delete these lights,
| | 06:08 | because I have saved them out to their
own scene file now and I can load those
| | 06:12 | in as a reference later. That way I can swap
out different lighting setups really easily.
| | 06:19 | So I will go ahead and actually
press the Delete key to delete those.
| | 06:22 | That's it. I don't need to save my scene.
I haven't made any changes to
| | 06:26 | stil_life_master_reference.
| | 06:28 | I have just created by new lighting setup.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Choosing a diffuse color and amount| 00:00 | We have got our scene laid out
and we made some basic lighting.
| | 00:03 | Now we're ready to start actually
building our Shaders in earnest.
| | 00:06 | I want to load that master scene in as
a reference. We go to the File menu and
| | 00:11 | choose Create Reference, still_life_
master_reference is the one we created that
| | 00:15 | has the matte painting in it.
| | 00:17 | I just want to double-check my
Namespace Options. I want to make sure that
| | 00:23 | that's set to, Merge into selected namespace.
| | 00:25 | So that I won't get super long names on all my notes.
| | 00:29 | Go ahead and click Reference, and there
you go, I have got my scene loaded in.
| | 00:34 | Then a little bit closer here, hit 5 key to see shading.
| | 00:39 | I'll go ahead and add a material to this lemon,
so I have got it selected, and
| | 00:44 | then I'll right-click and choose Assign New Material.
| | 00:48 | I want that to be a Blinn material,
because it will need to have highlights.
| | 00:54 | So click on blinn, and I want to rename it of course.
| | 00:59 | So I'll call this one lemon1_blinn and press the Enter key.
| | 01:04 | What I really want to show you here
is just the diffuse color and amount.
| | 01:08 | The diffuse color is the main color of
the object. Go ahead and click on that.
| | 01:15 | That's the color that the matte
finish of the object will reflect.
| | 01:21 | So let's give that a bright yellow
maybe not quite so bright, let's reduce the
| | 01:25 | saturation just a little bit.
| | 01:27 | The other important aspect of diffuse
color is down here, it's the Diffuse amount.
| | 01:33 | This is little bit tricky in Maya, in fact,
by default, colors are dimmed
| | 01:38 | down to only 80% of their full brightness.
| | 01:42 | So you'll see as I reduces this Diffuse amount,
this color does not have any
| | 01:47 | effect when the Diffuse amount is 0.
| | 01:51 | So diffuse amount is a multiplier for
the Diffuse color, and it is set to about
| | 01:56 | 80%, or 0.8 by default. That's going
to have the effect of actually kind of
| | 02:01 | desaturating all the colors slightly.
| | 02:04 | That's actually a good thing.
In fact you usually don't want to have
| | 02:08 | fully saturated Diffuse colors,
because that lends a kind of plasticky fake
| | 02:12 | look to your rendering.
| | 02:14 | It was actually pretty wise of the Maya
developers to set the Diffuse amount
| | 02:18 | down a little bit, but in my
opinion it's a little bit too low.
| | 02:23 | For most of Maya scenes I will set the
Diffuse amount up to about 0.9 or perhaps 0.95.
| | 02:30 | But really, I almost never set it up to
the full amount of one, because again,
| | 02:34 | that's going to produce a kind of fake or plastic look.
| | 02:38 | That's the basics of working with diffuse color in Maya.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Understanding ambient color| 00:00 | Let's work with Ambient Color.
| | 00:02 | I'll select my lemon and go to the
Attribute Editor, Ctrl+A it's not already
| | 00:07 | open and increase the
Ambient Color a bit to about half.
| | 00:11 | You can see the effect here in
this Sample Swatch in the Attribute
| | 00:16 | Editor, but with the default rendering
in the viewport we can't see the
| | 00:20 | effect of Ambient Color.
| | 00:22 | However, if you choose a different
renderer you'll be able to see it.
| | 00:26 | I'll choose high-quality rendering and now
we can see the effect of that Ambient
| | 00:29 | Color as I increase that.
| | 00:31 | What is Ambient Color doing?
| | 00:33 | Essentially, it's setting the black point for the Diffuse Color.
| | 00:38 | If the Diffuse Amount here is the white point
then the Ambient Color is the black point.
| | 00:44 | In other words if this is set all the
way down then an area that's in shadow
| | 00:50 | is going to be black, assuming there's no
other lighting. But if I increase the
| | 00:55 | Ambient Color up to about half,
| | 00:57 | what I am saying is I don't want the
Ambient Color to ever be darker than this
| | 01:03 | color multiplied by the Ambient Color.
| | 01:07 | Regardless of lighting, it's essentially
biasing up the black, increasing the
| | 01:13 | brightness, if you will.
| | 01:15 | So if Diffuse is the contrast, or the
white point, than Ambient Colors here is
| | 01:23 | the brightness or the black point.
| | 01:26 | I actually don't tend to use it much.
| | 01:29 | I would prefer to get that effect by
adding more lights in my scene,
| | 01:33 | because I think that that's more realistic.
| | 01:35 | But that's how Ambient Color works in Maya.
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| Bump mapping| 00:00 | Because we can't have infinitely detailed
surfaces in CG we have to use maps to
| | 00:07 | stimulate surfaces. A bump map is
a way to stimulate the roughness of a
| | 00:12 | particular surface, whether
it's got dents and bumps in it.
| | 00:15 | So I will add a bump map here at to my lemon.
Go ahead and select that lemon.
| | 00:21 | I want to go to the Attribute Editor,
and go to that lemon1_blinn shading
| | 00:25 | node, and you'll see Bump Mapping here.
| | 00:28 | I could add the bump map through the
Hypershade, it's just a little bit more
| | 00:32 | convenient to do it here in the attribute editor.
| | 00:34 | I'll go a head and click on Create
Rendered Node. Now I can use any node as a
| | 00:40 | texture map in other words I could
use a file or any one of these.
| | 00:44 | In this case I'm going to use 3D Texture
called Leather, and that's going to
| | 00:49 | create a pattern based upon something
called Cellular Automata, go ahead and
| | 00:55 | click on that leather.
| | 00:56 | Now I won't see the result in the Viewport
right away unless I'm in High-Quality
| | 01:01 | Rendering mode, and I have
hardware texturing turned on.
| | 01:05 | We can do that from the Shading menu here,
or I can just press the 6 key on the keyboard.
| | 01:11 | There is our bump map.
Get in a little bit closer on that.
| | 01:16 | You see that it's quite strident,
it's a very strong effect here with
| | 01:19 | the Bump Depth of 1.
| | 01:21 | I'll reduce that Bump Depth a little
bit to let say .2 and you'll see that
| | 01:27 | looks a bit better.
| | 01:28 | If I do a Rendering of that just click
on Quick Render you'll see that it's even
| | 01:34 | more subtle in the rendering.
| | 01:37 | The Hardware Texturing here is going to give us
a rough approximation of what it will look like.
| | 01:43 | So now let's adjust some of these leather
attributes to get the look that we want.
| | 01:47 | I'll go to the Leather node here.
| | 01:50 | A bump map works on the basis
of the brightness of the texture.
| | 01:54 | If you got a white pixel that's going
to cause a texture to bump upward,
| | 01:59 | and if you have got black, then
it's going to recess downward.
| | 02:03 | In this case I want to cell color here to be black.
| | 02:07 | So I'll produce little circular dents
in this surface and then the crease color here,
| | 02:11 | I'll set that to white, you can
see that that's a stronger even now.
| | 02:17 | Now I don't really need the
creases themselves I just need a white
| | 02:20 | background behind the cells.
| | 02:22 | So I can turn the Creases off.
| | 02:24 | I can play around with some of these
attributes here, you can see Spottyness
| | 02:28 | and so on, Randomness. Basically I
want to have a low threshold here, I don't
| | 02:36 | wanted to actually be clipping off.
| | 02:37 | I can play around with this a bit.
| | 02:43 | Maybe reduced the Density, so I
will have fewer of those little dots.
| | 02:50 | If you start having performance issues
here in the View then of course you can
| | 02:55 | always switch your Hardware Texturing back
off and just focus in here on what we see.
| | 03:04 | That's a very simple introduction to a Bump Map.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| 3D texture placement| 00:00 | We've placed a bump map on this lemon,
now I want to show you how to adjust
| | 00:04 | the placement in the size of that bump map.
| | 00:07 | Let's go to the Hypershade for that.
| | 00:09 | I'm going to close the Attribute Editor and go to
| | 00:12 | Window>Rendering Editors>Hypershade.
| | 00:16 | I want to graph the network of this lemon
shader, right-click and Graph the Network.
| | 00:21 | You can see there is a place3DTexture node
that's feeding into the texture.
| | 00:25 | That's determining where is
that texture is going to land on the
| | 00:29 | surface of the object.
| | 00:30 | I'll select that place3DTexture node
and minimize the Hypershade and go out to
| | 00:36 | the front view, I'll tap the spacebar.
You can see that we've got this
| | 00:40 | little green box highlighted, that's
the place3DTexture node selected.
| | 00:45 | If I move that around it's going to change
the placement on the lemon here as we see.
| | 00:52 | So as I move that I'm changing where that
texture is going to land on that surface.
| | 00:57 | More importantly, in this case, is the scale.
| | 01:01 | If I scale that texture up and down, I can
change the size of the texture on the lemon.
| | 01:08 | I can even stretch it as well.
| | 01:12 | If I wanted a non-uniform look, I could
stretch it in different dimensions.
| | 01:16 | Well in this case I do want to
have it be uniform in all dimensions.
| | 01:21 | The 3D texture placement node could be
parented to an animated object, if you
| | 01:25 | want to make sure that the texture
is locked onto that surface.
| | 01:28 | In this case it doesn't matter.
| | 01:29 | I can just leave it as it is.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Defining specular shading| 00:00 | The diffuse component of a material is
the light that's reflected back from the
| | 00:05 | object if the object has a
rough surface or a matte finish.
| | 00:11 | So almost all materials have a diffuse
component and here we've got a yellow
| | 00:16 | diffuse component for the lemon.
| | 00:19 | Some objects also have a specular component.
They've got a shininess aspect to them.
| | 00:25 | The lemon is a case where we
do need a specular highlight.
| | 00:29 | That's why I assigned a blend shading node
to the lemon when we first added the material.
| | 00:33 | If I'd used the Lambert then we would have
no specular components or no highlights.
| | 00:38 | I just want to show you the specular
attributes in the blend shading node.
| | 00:42 | I'll select that lemon, go to the Attribute
Editor and go to the shading node here.
| | 00:46 | You'll see if you scroll down below
the common material attributes, you'll
| | 00:50 | see the specular shading section.
| | 00:52 | Let's talk about what these
attributes do and what they mean.
| | 00:55 | First you've got the eccentricity, and
if you adjust that, what you'll see is it
| | 00:59 | changes the spread of this shiny highlight.
| | 01:02 | Essentially this is the glossiness or the spread.
| | 01:04 | If it's a very low value, then you're
going to get a very small intense highlight
| | 01:09 | as if it were a metal shader; and if I
reduce that Eccentricity down all the way
| | 01:14 | to 0 then, it essentially makes
that highlight so small it disappears.
| | 01:19 | Eccentricity is the spread or the glossiness.
Then you've got the Specular Roll Off,
| | 01:23 | which is the intensity. If I reduce
the Specular Roll Off, essentially
| | 01:27 | that's just going to dim down the specular highlight.
| | 01:31 | If I give it a full strength of 1 then
you are going to get a nice shiny highlight.
| | 01:36 | Turn that back down to the default of about .7.
| | 01:39 | Additionally, you've got the Specular
Color this is the color of light that's
| | 01:44 | reflected back to the camera and
is defaulted to a neutral gray.
| | 01:49 | What that means is that if you
shine white light onto this object,
| | 01:52 | it will reflect back essentially white light.
| | 01:55 | As you see however, it's not quite that
simple because it's kind of mixing with
| | 02:00 | the diffuse color a bit.
| | 02:02 | If I increase the Specular Color up to
a value of 1, or fully intense, then
| | 02:08 | you can see that we're getting
shiny white highlights now.
| | 02:11 | If I do a quick render of that
you'll see it even more clearly.
| | 02:15 | It's even blasting out a little bit,
this kind of over exposed a bit.
| | 02:19 | The Specular Color, in most cases,
wants to be a neutral gray.
| | 02:24 | If you were doing certain types of
materials like a gold shader than you
| | 02:29 | might change that Specular Color to be
similar to the diffuse color.
| | 02:33 | What that would result in is, instead of
having white highlights, you could have
| | 02:37 | colored highlights.
| | 02:38 | Just to illustrate that if I just quickly
change my Specular Color to maybe an
| | 02:44 | orange, give a little bit more saturation there.
| | 02:48 | We can kind of see that we're
getting a different result here now.
| | 02:52 | I do a render, so now we're getting
intense highlights but they're not showing
| | 02:57 | as white. They're showing as this yellow, orange color.
| | 03:02 | Finally you have the Reflectivity here
and that's a very important attribute.
| | 03:06 | If I wanted to mirror reflections on a surface,
then I would what a non-zero reflectivity.
| | 03:13 | The default reflectivity in a Maya
Blend Shader is .5 and currently I have
| | 03:19 | Raytracing disabled in my scene.
| | 03:21 | So I will not see a reflective image.
In other words, I won't see a mirror
| | 03:26 | reflection now unless I turn on Raytracing.
| | 03:29 | Let's see what that looks like if I do that.
I'll go into the Render Settings, to
| | 03:34 | the Maya Software tab, scroll down a
bit and turned Raytracing on, its found in
| | 03:38 | the Raytracing Quality section.
| | 03:40 | I'll turn that on and I'll do another quickie render
and it'll take a little bit longer.
| | 03:47 | But you can kind of see it's a bit subtle,
but you are getting a mirror
| | 03:50 | reflection in the surface now
and that's actually not desirable.
| | 03:55 | What I would recommend is, when you
create a new blend material that the first
| | 03:59 | thing you would probably do is
turn that Reflectivity down to 0.
| | 04:03 | Unless you explicitly wanted a mirror
reflection. The problem in Maya is that
| | 04:07 | all the blend shaders will start out
with a reflectivity of .5 and then, if
| | 04:12 | you simply just turn on Reytracing, all blend
shaders will start reflecting the environment.
| | 04:18 | Again, I recommend that you turn the
Reflectivity down to 0 just by default,
| | 04:22 | unless you're planning to make a mirror reflection.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Duplicating networks| 00:00 | To create variations on a theme for
your shaders, you can duplicate nodes.
| | 00:05 | We can do that in various ways from the Hypershade.
| | 00:10 | Open that up. I'll graph a network for
this lemon by clicking Graph Network.
| | 00:16 | You can see that it is composed of these four nodes.
| | 00:18 | I can duplicate these in various ways.
| | 00:21 | First of all I can use just straight up duplicate,
which is, as you probably know, is Ctrl+D.
| | 00:27 | Now there is little bit of a quirk in Maya around this.
| | 00:31 | If I select for example these three nodes
and hit Ctrl+D, then I'll get
| | 00:35 | three new shading nodes.
| | 00:37 | I've got a new leather, a
new lemon and a new bump.
| | 00:41 | They are not connected, but we got duplicate
copies of those, so that kind of makes sense.
| | 00:46 | Let me show you this though, let me
delete those and if I select all four of
| | 00:50 | these, including that place3dTexture
node and hit Ctrl+D, then just strangely
| | 00:57 | I only get a copy of the place3dTexture node.
| | 01:00 | So Maya is giving precedence to
that selection and it is overriding the
| | 01:04 | selection of these other shading nodes.
| | 01:06 | Don't let that bite you, that's just
a quirk of the program, delete that.
| | 01:12 | We can also accomplish that same result
by using the menus, instead of the hot key.
| | 01:17 | I can select a shading node and go to
the Hypershade menu, and in the Edit
| | 01:23 | menu there is a cascading submenu here that
says Duplicate and we have a few options here.
| | 01:29 | If I choose Duplicate>Without Network,
that's the same as hitting Ctrl+D on the keyboard.
| | 01:36 | If I select Multiple nodes and do
Edit>Duplicate>Without Network, then once
| | 01:41 | again, I'll get three new nodes here,
but they won't be connected.
| | 01:45 | I'll have to connect them manually.
| | 01:48 | Well, I can duplicate the entire network,
if I want to create a different
| | 01:53 | version of this lemon shader, I can
select the root level of the network, in
| | 01:57 | other words, the material shading node
and then in that Hypershade menu I can
| | 02:02 | choose Edit>Duplicate>Shading Network.
| | 02:06 | That's not just going to duplicate the
blinn node but it's going to
| | 02:09 | duplicate all four of those.
| | 02:12 | In order to see what we're doing
a little bit better, I can just select
| | 02:16 | all of these, and click up here to
Graph the Network, show the input and
| | 02:21 | output connections.
| | 02:22 | There we go, so I've got two versions here now.
| | 02:25 | I can move that around, as you can see,
I've duplicated the entire shading network.
| | 02:30 | These are all independent nodes.
| | 02:33 | That way if I want to, I could change
for example, color of one lemon
| | 02:38 | without affecting the other.
| | 02:39 | Or I could change the pattern of the
leather 3D texture without affecting
| | 02:44 | the other one as well.
| | 02:45 | By way of example, I could just
select one of these and hit Ctrl+A,
| | 02:51 | get up the Attribute Editor and may just
change this color a little bit, so it's not
| | 02:55 | exactly the same, maybe give a
little bit of variation, there we go.
| | 03:00 | Then I can assign that to
one of these other lemons.
| | 03:03 | Select it and then right-click on the Shading
Node and choose Assign Material To Selection.
| | 03:09 | So as you can see here we've got
two slightly different colored lemons.
| | 03:13 | And likewise, if I change any of
these other attributes, they are
| | 03:16 | completely independent.
| | 03:17 | If I select this leather node here, go
to the Attribute Editor, Ctrl+A, as you
| | 03:21 | see, I can change the Size of
that or the Density or whatever.
| | 03:25 | And it's only affecting that one object,
because they have got two completely
| | 03:28 | separate shading networks.
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| Building branching networks| 00:00 | We've seen how to duplicate shading networks.
| | 00:03 | Now let's talk about Branching Networks.
| | 00:05 | Which are very useful and very efficient.
| | 00:07 | You can choose to have multiple Networks
in which some of the nodes are shared
| | 00:13 | and some are unique.
| | 00:14 | Like for example, if I wanted to have
two lemons that were different colors
| | 00:19 | but still had the exact same
Bump attributes, let's do that.
| | 00:23 | I'll go ahead and graph the network on
this lemon here, as you can see once again
| | 00:28 | I've got these four nodes.
| | 00:30 | And what I want to do is just duplicate
only the material node and that's the
| | 00:33 | last one in the chain here or
the root level of the shader.
| | 00:37 | I've got that one selected and I'll go
back into my Hypershade Edit menu and
| | 00:41 | choose Duplicate>With Connections to Network,
click on that.
| | 00:46 | Now I've got a new material node
its called lemon1_blinn2, I'll tell you
| | 00:52 | what, I'll just rename that,
call that one lemon3_blinn.
| | 00:59 | And let's change its attributes too.
| | 01:01 | I'll go to Ctrl+A and change this up
so that we can see the difference here,
| | 01:06 | I'll choose a lime green color maybe.
| | 01:08 | Both of these Shader are sharing the
same texture placement node, the same 3d
| | 01:15 | texture and the same bump amount.
| | 01:19 | I'll go ahead and assign that material
to one of these other objects, right-click
| | 01:23 | and Assign Material To Selection.
| | 01:25 | And if change any of the attributes
that are upstream from these nodes,
| | 01:31 | then that change will be
reflected in both of the objects.
| | 01:33 | For example, if I select the bump3d
node and go to its Ctrl+A attributes,
| | 01:39 | I can adjust the Bump Depth.
| | 01:40 | And as you can see, its affecting
both of those shaders equally, cool!
| | 01:46 | I'm at back down to .2.That's a pretty
simple case of a branching network. Let's
| | 01:51 | look at a slightly more involve case,
in which you've got multiple shared node.
| | 01:56 | Let's say you want the branching to
happen earlier in the data flow here.
| | 02:01 | Let's say, I want to have one placement node,
but then have duplicate texture and bump nodes;
| | 02:09 | so that we could have different parameters
on these, but yet they could still be
| | 02:12 | driven by the same texture placement.
| | 02:16 | So to do that, I want to select the nodes
that I wish to duplicate, which will be
| | 02:20 | these three. I go back up into that
hyper shade edit menu, and once choose
| | 02:25 | Duplicate>With Connections to Network.
| | 02:29 | I'll just rearrange the graph I'll click up
here to just clean up the graph.
| | 02:32 | Now you can see this didn't actually
give us precisely what we wanted.
| | 02:37 | What we got was kind of a weird version
of that, in which we've got multiple
| | 02:45 | new nodes, but what's happened is
that they are all only connected to the
| | 02:49 | immediate incoming Node.
| | 02:52 | So you can see here that this placement
is feeding into my leather2 and
| | 02:58 | that's what we want.
| | 03:00 | But then leather2 is now branching and we
don't actually want that to branch at this point.
| | 03:06 | So we just need to rebuild some of these connections.
| | 03:09 | So basically, I just want to get organized
here and figure out what I've got.
| | 03:13 | So this is lemon1_blinn2, this
is lemon1_blinn and that's lemon3.
| | 03:19 | So this is the duplicate here that I
just made I'll call that lemon4_blinn.
| | 03:25 | I just want to reconnect all of these.
| | 03:30 | So here's Bump3d2; that wants
to be applied to this lemon4.
| | 03:37 | So I'll middle-mouse drag that into
the bump slot and that's connected.
| | 03:42 | Likewise I want to feed this leather2
into this new bump node, so I'll
| | 03:46 | select the bump node and drag that leather
with a middle-mouse button on to the bump value.
| | 03:52 | Now this is very important that you connect
to the bump value and not the bump depth.
| | 03:57 | The bump value is your texture
and the bump depth is the amount.
| | 04:01 | So now we've got a branching network,
which is what I was trying to achieve.
| | 04:05 | So now I've got one placement node
that's feeding these two sort of
| | 04:10 | parallel shading networks.
| | 04:12 | I'm going to assign this lemon material
to one of these other objects.
| | 04:17 | Select the object, right-click and
assign, and to illustrate now I can
| | 04:22 | choose let's say, the leather2 texture node
and change some of its attributes,
| | 04:29 | like reduce the density, and you can
see that that's effecting just this one
| | 04:34 | object; change that up.
| | 04:38 | Likewise, if I choose the shading node
or material node, if I adjust that color
| | 04:43 | it's only affecting that one object.
| | 04:47 | However, they are sharing a placement node.
| | 04:51 | So if I select that placement node,
| | 04:53 | I can go and for example, change its
Scale, we can do that just directly in
| | 04:58 | the channel box here.
| | 04:59 | So if I change this Scale to let's say 3,
that's going to affect all three of those.
| | 05:04 | These two have a shared network, in as
much as they share everything except for
| | 05:09 | the blinn material node.
| | 05:12 | These two have a shared network, in which
they share only the texture placement.
| | 05:18 | So that's the only thing that
is shared among these two.
| | 05:21 | So if I change that you'll see those both update.
| | 05:27 | That's really the essentials of building
a branching networks in Maya.
| | 05:32 | This is a very helpful technique.
| | 05:33 | You would use this for example, if you
had a file node that you needed to have
| | 05:38 | instance multiple times and multiple shaders.
| | 05:41 | That would save you time if you
needed to swap out the file for example.
| | 05:44 | Because you wouldn't have to go into a million
different file nodes and change them all.
| | 05:49 | You would just change one, and then
all of the downstream nodes that were
| | 05:52 | connected to that, would assume that change.
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| Exporting and importing networks| 00:00 | Once you've built up a Shading Network,
you might want to actually save that
| | 00:04 | out to its own file so you can get
access to it easily in the future, without
| | 00:09 | having to load up an entire scene that's
got a lot of geometry or animation in it.
| | 00:13 | Hypershade Shade makes it
really easy for you to do that.
| | 00:17 | You can select one or more shading nodes here.
Hold down Ctrl+Shift and
| | 00:22 | select these, and then simply go up
to the File menu within the Hypershade
| | 00:27 | window and choose Export Selected Network.
| | 00:30 | It will not just export just those
three material nodes, but it will also
| | 00:35 | export any of the upstream nodes,
that are feeding into these.
| | 00:38 | I just want to save it into my scenes folder.
It saves it as a Maya
| | 00:43 | ASCII scene file so there's no special
file format just for materials.
| | 00:48 | Let me just call this one lemon_shaders.
| | 00:51 | That's actually the process for building up
Material libraries in Maya,
| | 00:56 | is simply selecting the material nodes that
you want to export and issuing that command.
| | 01:02 | Let's make a new scene now and re-import those.
| | 01:05 | File>New Scene and I can just simply go to the File
menu within the Hypershade menu and choose Import.
| | 01:14 | I want to find it, here it is lemon_shaders.ma,
click Import and there you go.
| | 01:19 | We've got our shaders.
It's a totally blank scene here now.
| | 01:23 | You'll notice by the way, that does
include the 3D texture node so that
| | 01:27 | did actually come in on the import.
| | 01:31 | You can see that it's got the namespaces
here with little colon in front of that.
| | 01:38 | That's a simple introduction to how you
can import and export shading networks
| | 01:42 | in Maya, and that concludes our
chapter on Essential Techniques.
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|
|
3. mental ray MaterialsSetting up the mental ray renderer| 00:00 | In this chapter, we'll look at
basic materials for mental ray.
| | 00:05 | Mental Ray of course is the
alternate renderer from Maya that has a lot
| | 00:08 | of advanced features.
| | 00:10 | We want to set that up now.
| | 00:12 | I'll begin by referencing in my still life scene,
go to the File menu and
| | 00:16 | choose Create Reference,
still_life_master_reference.ma is the one I want.
| | 00:21 | I want to bring that in.
| | 00:23 | I need to make a few changes to the Render Settings.
| | 00:26 | But I need to do that here in this parent scene
rather than in the scene that
| | 00:30 | I just referenced in, because when you
reference a scene, the Render Settings
| | 00:35 | are not carried over from the reference.
| | 00:38 | Here in the parent scene, I want to the
go to the Render Settings dialog.
| | 00:42 | I want to choose my Renderer,
Render Using mental ray.
| | 00:46 | The main thing that we want to
look at here is couple of things.
| | 00:50 | Well, first of all, I just want
to scroll down in this common tab.
| | 00:54 | I'm just going to change the Width and
Height of the rendering; let's give it
| | 00:57 | a Height of 360 pixels. I also want to
just change the quality of the renderer itself.
| | 01:04 | I'll go to the Quality tab here and you'll
see there are some presets here and
| | 01:08 | it's set to Draft by default.
| | 01:10 | I could crank that up to Production Quality.
That does change a few options
| | 01:15 | here, the most important being
the Anti-Aliasing options here.
| | 01:20 | Basically what mental ray does is it
tries to detect if there's a lot of
| | 01:25 | contrast between neighboring pixels.
| | 01:27 | If there is a high contrast there,
that means there's probably an aliasing
| | 01:31 | artifact or a jagged pixel or pixilation artifact.
| | 01:35 | In those high contrast areas, then mental ray
will subdivide the sampling and
| | 01:42 | basically recalculate those pixels
more than once and find their average.
| | 01:46 | That's what this does when
I change these Sample Levels.
| | 01:49 | So this is the Adaptive Sampling mode,
and that's probably going to work
| | 01:53 | best in most cases.
| | 01:55 | You'll see that there are a bunch of
other options down here as well,
| | 01:59 | such as Raytracing and so on.
| | 02:00 | We won't really need to play around
with these settings very much in this course.
| | 02:04 | But in general practice, in production,
you will probably need to go in here
| | 02:09 | occasionally and change the number of reflections
and the number of shadows cast, for example.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Lighting the scene for mental ray| 00:00 | When lighting a scene in mental ray
there are a few special considerations.
| | 00:04 | The first thing I would like to mention
is that there are couple of light types
| | 00:09 | that work in Maya software that don't
work in mental ray because there is no
| | 00:13 | mental ray equivalent of them.
| | 00:14 | If you go to the Create menu and look
under Lights you'll see that there are six
| | 00:18 | different types of lights.
| | 00:20 | The Ambient Light and the Volume Light
do not work in mental ray, again, because
| | 00:24 | there is no mental ray equivalent of those.
| | 00:26 | It's not a problem though;
| | 00:28 | it's not like your restricted by
that because you can still get amazing
| | 00:32 | renderings by using just the Directional,
Point, Spot and Area Lights in mental ray.
| | 00:38 | Let me import the lighting setup that I created.
| | 00:41 | I am not going to reference the lights
in this time, I am going to directly
| | 00:46 | import them because I will need
to make some changes to the lights.
| | 00:49 | If you make changes on nodes that
have been referenced, then things get a
| | 00:54 | little bit murky and that's not a good practice.
| | 00:57 | Things that get referenced in shouldn't really be changed.
| | 01:01 | In this case I am going to import my lighting setup.
| | 01:03 | File>Import and stil_life_lights_interior_01
and scroll down.
| | 01:12 | I can just choose Merge into selected namespace
and that way I won't get the issue of
| | 01:16 | super long node names.
| | 01:20 | So I've imported those three lights now.
If we do a render of this now in
| | 01:25 | mental ray let's see what it looks like.
| | 01:27 | I'll highlight that Camera View and do a
Quick Render and we've set our renderer
| | 01:32 | up to be production quality.
| | 01:35 | But you'll see that it doesn't really look
quite right in terms we expect the
| | 01:39 | shadows to be softer, we're not really
getting a good sort of modeling across
| | 01:44 | the surface like we might expect.
It's almost looking like these are point light sources.
| | 01:49 | That's because in fact there is a
special option in the Attribute Editor
| | 01:53 | that you need to enable for Area Lights in
order to get good results with mental ray.
| | 01:57 | I'll select one of these Area Lights
and go to its attributes and what you
| | 02:03 | are looking for is there is a section
that says mental ray. So let's find it,
| | 02:07 | it's here mental ray.
| | 02:09 | Area Light, Use Light Shape, that
needs to be on and I'll do that for all of
| | 02:14 | these; got three Area Lights.
| | 02:18 | What that's going to do is going to treat
the Area Light as a complete light
| | 02:22 | source, in other words light will emanate
from every point on that Area Light.
| | 02:27 | If that switch is off then only the shadows
are going to be area shadows and the
| | 02:32 | light source, in fact, would just be a Point Light source.
| | 02:35 | But now I have enabled Use Light Shape
on all three of those and let's go back
| | 02:40 | to my render window. Let me store the image
that I rendered previously and do a new rendering.
| | 02:46 | What we'll see here is that the Light
Intensity has diminished.
| | 02:51 | That's not an error, it's not a mistake.
It's just the behavior of mental ray.
| | 02:55 | To compensate for that, I'll just increase
the Intensity of those Area Lights.
| | 03:00 | And so I don't have to keep doing renders
over and over again, I am going to do an IPR;
| | 03:05 | Interactive Production Rendering.
| | 03:07 | So I'll click here to save that image
and then I'll also do an IPR and draw a
| | 03:13 | little rectangle around a representative area.
| | 03:16 | Now I can make adjustments to my
lighting in shadows and that will be
| | 03:20 | updated in real time.
| | 03:22 | Select one of these lights here.
We just need to increase the Intensity.
| | 03:26 | I am going to go to that shape node here
and turn the Intensity up a bit like
| | 03:30 | let's say 0.8 for the key light, which is on the left.
| | 03:34 | I've got my Fill Light here, maybe
I'll increase its Intensity as well;
| | 03:38 | areaLightshape2, Intensity of let's
say 0.5, that maybe a bit too much.
| | 03:44 | I'll bring it back down to 0.3.
| | 03:46 | Then I've also got the light coming from outdoors.
| | 03:50 | This is for light shining through the window.
| | 03:52 | Once again go to it's Shape node
and increase it's Intensity a bit.
| | 03:59 | Now that's looking better and
I can do a full render of that.
| | 04:02 | However, we'll notice that the shadows
are kind of grainy. We did improve
| | 04:08 | the shadow quality for the Maya
software version of this lighting setup,
| | 04:12 | but there is a slightly different workflow
for doing that in mental ray.
| | 04:16 | I'll store that image., I'll go back to
the Attribute Editor for these, Ctrl+A.
| | 04:23 | Let's do a little IPR while we are at it.
| | 04:26 | I just want to correct those shadows.
| | 04:30 | The option that I'm looking for here to
increase the quality of those shadows is
| | 04:34 | here in the Area Lights section High Samples.
I want to turn that up to let's
| | 04:40 | say 64 and that's going to increase the
lighting quality overall including the
| | 04:44 | shadows. Do that for these others as well.
| | 04:52 | Now I should have pretty clean shadows throughout.
| | 04:55 | Good, so I'll do a full test render, see how that looks.
| | 04:58 | It will take a moment to calculate that,
because I've got pretty high quality settings.
| | 05:03 | But again we need to have pretty good
lighting in a shot in order to properly
| | 05:08 | evaluate whether the materials
are doing what we want or not.
| | 05:11 | Well, we've got a basic lighting setup here
in mental ray and now we can move on
| | 05:16 | to actually digging into the mental ray material attributes.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using mental ray shading nodes| 00:00 | Mental ray has many advanced shading
notes that we can employ to achieve all
| | 00:05 | sorts of different effects.
| | 00:06 | We won't have time to make an exhaustive
survey of all the different shading
| | 00:11 | nodes in mental ray.
| | 00:12 | But as we go through the course, I'll
introduce you to the most important ones,
| | 00:16 | and the ones you will use most commonly.
| | 00:18 | Before I do that, I just want to mention
that in this version of this scene,
| | 00:22 | I've actually reverted all those fancy
lighting changes that I did previously.
| | 00:28 | In other words, my area lights, I've disabled
the Use light shape option and
| | 00:33 | I have turned off all the shadows.
The reason for that is the render times
| | 00:37 | were just too long.
| | 00:38 | So I have turned all that off and we'll be
able to just focus in on just the material.
| | 00:43 | I am going to assign a material
called DGS to the candelabra here.
| | 00:48 | DGS is a really good material shader for metal.
| | 00:52 | Go ahead and select that candelabra and
right-click and choose Assign New Material.
| | 00:58 | It's a mental ray material
and it will only work with mental ray.
| | 01:02 | When you go to the mental ray>Materials
section here, you'll see all of these.
| | 01:07 | These will not work in any other
renderer other then mental ray.
| | 01:10 | Here we go, dgs_material.
Go ahead and click on that to assign it.
| | 01:15 | In the Attribute Editor here, now
I'll go to that material shading node.
| | 01:18 | I am just going to rename this, I'll call it brass_dgs.
| | 01:24 | DGS stands for Diffuse Glossy and Specular.
| | 01:29 | The Diffuse component of course,
is the scattered light component.
| | 01:33 | When light hits a rough surface or a
matte finish, the light gets scattered.
| | 01:37 | You don't have a coherent reflection.
| | 01:39 | For brass and other metals the
diffuse component is going to be minimal.
| | 01:44 | In fact we can just start out by
bring it down almost completely to black,
| | 01:49 | almost no diffuse component for metals.
| | 01:51 | Now we have got the glossy and specular components here.
| | 01:55 | The glossy component is the highlights and
the specular components are the mirror reflections.
| | 02:02 | We are getting closer here. I'll just do an
interactive production render on this.
| | 02:11 | Click IPR, drag a little box around
the base of our candelabra.
| | 02:19 | You can see that we're getting some shiny
reflections there, and that's because Glossy
| | 02:24 | and Specular have non-zero values.
| | 02:27 | If I bring those down to zero, then we won't get much.
| | 02:31 | Glossy is the specular highlights and
Specular are the mirror reflections.
| | 02:38 | But in fact, you will be hard-pressed
to tell the difference between these.
| | 02:42 | If you just increase them up, they
looked very similar, I can't really tell
| | 02:46 | much difference there.
| | 02:48 | The difference comes into play when
you start playing around with this Shiny
| | 02:52 | attribute here. What that does is
increase or decrease the glossiness factor.
| | 02:58 | This attribute here is the color of
the Glossy highlights and the Shiny
| | 03:02 | attribute is essentially how polished the surface is.
| | 03:07 | If I reduce that Shiny attribute down to
a very low value in single digits,
| | 03:12 | what we'll get is a nice effect here.
| | 03:14 | We are getting this very interesting
soft glossy effect, where it's not quite
| | 03:19 | fully polished. Then of course, we
have got the Specular component here and
| | 03:24 | that is the mirror reflections.
| | 03:26 | Once I unable that, you'll see we are
getting mirror reflections in addition to
| | 03:30 | the Specular highlights.
| | 03:33 | For brass, what I want is an orange or
yellow color to this Glossy component.
| | 03:39 | Go ahead and click on that and dial in
a kind of orange color, maybe reduce the
| | 03:45 | value a bit, a little bit more yellow there.
| | 03:54 | Then I do want some reflection; so
I can increase the Specular highlight,
| | 03:59 | and when I do that, you see that it
kind of desaturates the Glossy component.
| | 04:03 | So there is a combination effect between these two.
| | 04:07 | So I might have to ping pong back and
forth between these a couple of times to
| | 04:11 | get the result I want. Maybe a little
bit more value to that Glossy highlight.
| | 04:17 | Just play around with the shininess
a little bit. Maybe I can make it a
| | 04:21 | little bit more of a coherent reflection;
or if I want it to be a kind of dull finish,
| | 04:27 | I can reduce that shininess amount.
| | 04:29 | All right. Well, that's a basic
introduction to the DGS material.
| | 04:34 | As I said, mental ray has
lots and lots of shader nodes.
| | 04:37 | This is just one of them that you will use very commonly.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Choosing mia_material_x presets| 00:00 | The DGS material is designed really for metals.
| | 00:04 | It's a single-purpose shader.
| | 00:07 | Now let's look at mental ray's mia material,
which is an all-purpose shader that
| | 00:13 | can be used for almost anything.
| | 00:15 | I want to assign that mia material shader to
the bowl here and try out different presets.
| | 00:22 | Select the bowl and right-click and
choose Assign New Material, go to
| | 00:26 | mental ray>Materials and I am looking for
mia, mia_material, mia_material_x,
| | 00:32 | mia_material_x_passes; what does all this mean?
| | 00:36 | Well, MI stands for mental images,
which was the company that developed mental
| | 00:42 | ray before they were acquired by NVIDIA.
| | 00:44 | Mia material just means it's a generic material.
| | 00:48 | mia_material_x is the improved version.
| | 00:51 | You could think of that as version 2.0 of the mia_material.
| | 00:54 | The old version is preserved here
for backward compatibility with old scenes.
| | 01:00 | Likewise, you will see one here that says
mia_material_x_passess and that's a
| | 01:05 | version of the mia material that
is designed for render passes.
| | 01:09 | If you want to render out for example,
the reflections separately from the
| | 01:12 | diffuse component, you'd need
to use mia_material_x_passes.
| | 01:17 | In fact I always use mia_material_x_passes,
just in case I might need to use render passes later.
| | 01:24 | I'll go ahead and click on that
and I will go to that material node.
| | 01:29 | Let's do a test render just to see what it
looks like with just default attributes.
| | 01:34 | Go ahead and go up to my Render view, click on that.
| | 01:38 | When that's finished rendering, what
you will see is you're getting a gray
| | 01:41 | diffuse color with a little bit of
shiny highlights and that's the default
| | 01:45 | behavior of the mia_material.
| | 01:47 | Let's go ahead and store that image
in the Render view and now we can play
| | 01:52 | around with some of the presets here.
| | 01:55 | Mia material has lots of useful presets over here.
| | 01:59 | Any node in Maya can have presets associated
with it, this one has a bunch there
| | 02:04 | set up from software developers.
| | 02:06 | If you click and hold on that, you get some options.
| | 02:08 | For example, if I want this to be
just a matte finish, I would go down to
| | 02:13 | MatteFinish and choose Replace.
| | 02:16 | That's going to just overwrite all
the values that we currently see in the
| | 02:20 | Attribute Editor now. Click on that
and you will see we get no highlight now.
| | 02:24 | I could do a region render of
this or I could do an IPR render.
| | 02:29 | I want to recommend that you only use
the IPR interactive production renderer
| | 02:35 | when you're changing single attributes.
| | 02:37 | I have experienced Maya crashing when I was
trying to change the presets with IPR running.
| | 02:45 | What I recommend is if you're changing presets
then you just do region renders instead of IPR.
| | 02:50 | Now there are no shiny highlights there.
| | 02:53 | As you can see there are lots of presets
to play with, for example we can
| | 02:57 | choose a GlazedCeramic preset; and then
for example we could change up the base
| | 03:01 | color here, giving that a little bit of a
terracottish color; and do another region render.
| | 03:10 | My recommendation with mia_material is
that you start by choosing one of the
| | 03:14 | presets and get in the ballpark region
of the look that you want and then adjust
| | 03:19 | the individual attributes to fine-tune the look.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Exploring mia_material_x| 00:00 | The mia material is a monolithic
shader that has lot of controls,
| | 00:04 | many attributes that you can play with.
| | 00:06 | Let's look at some of the most important ones.
| | 00:08 | I will select my object that's got the mia material on it.
| | 00:12 | You can see here that I have got lots of stuff.
It's similar to what you'd see in a Maya Blinn shader.
| | 00:18 | To help you get familiar with what these
attributes are the, the developers have
| | 00:22 | provided you with extended tool tips.
If you hover your mouse over the name
| | 00:27 | of any attribute, you'll get information about what it does.
| | 00:31 | This is the diffuse color here and
the next one down where it says Weight,
| | 00:35 | that's the amount of Diffuse.
| | 00:39 | So I can increase the Diffuse Color,
brighten that up; I can reduce the
| | 00:43 | Weight and that's going to dim it back down again.
| | 00:47 | You will notice that we don't see
the change here in the viewport.
| | 00:50 | We will have to do a proper rendering to see that change.
| | 00:53 | But I can do an IPR, track a box around that.
| | 01:00 | You can see if I reduce the weight here,
I am reducing the amount of diffuse
| | 01:06 | component, that's being added to the material.
| | 01:09 | We still have reflections here.
| | 01:10 | You can see Reflectivity, we can turn that off.
| | 01:14 | Now I have got almost nothing.
| | 01:17 | Turn the Weight for the Diffuse Channel back up again.
| | 01:23 | One thing that the Maya Blinn Shader
doesn't have is this Roughness attribute.
| | 01:27 | This is really helpful for things like
unfinished unglazed ceramic.
| | 01:33 | If I have no roughness,
then it acts just like the Blinn Shader.
| | 01:38 | But if I increase the roughness up, what we
will see is it starts to lose its sort of shininess.
| | 01:45 | It says if we've sort of pumped up
the amount of diffusion or increase the
| | 01:52 | scattering of light that comes off that surface.
| | 01:56 | Cool, so that's Roughness.
| | 01:58 | Moving along down here you will
see there's a section for Reflection.
| | 02:02 | Unlike the Blinn material in Maya,
both Specular Reflections, in other
| | 02:08 | words specular shiny highlights and mirror
reflections, are both dealt with it once here.
| | 02:16 | They're not considered to be two separate
things like they are with the Blinn material.
| | 02:20 | We have got the amount of reflection here
to increase that Reflectivity and
| | 02:25 | that's going to impact the mirror reflections
as well as the Shiny highlights.
| | 02:33 | If you only want Shiny highlights and
no mirror reflections, then you can turn
| | 02:37 | on the switch that says Highlights Only,
turn it back off again.
| | 02:42 | Another fun thing that you can do here
with the Reflections section
| | 02:47 | is to play around with the glossiness.
| | 02:49 | If you have got a glossiness of very low value,
then it's going to give you kind
| | 02:55 | of blurry reflections, but only if
you increase the glossy samples here.
| | 03:00 | I've reduced the glossiness down to .15,
but I don't see a lot of change in
| | 03:05 | the reflectivity here until I increase
the number of glossy samples.
| | 03:09 | Wait for that to update.
| | 03:12 | With Glossy samples set up to 15 now,
we're able to see that our reflections
| | 03:18 | being sort of blurred; maybe get a
little bit more glossiness there. Cool.
| | 03:22 | So now we are getting the sort of shiny
highlight as well as a reflection,
| | 03:30 | but it's not a shiny coherent reflection,
in other words it's not focused; we got a
| | 03:35 | defocused reflection, very cool.
| | 03:38 | Those are the most basic attributes of mia_material.
| | 03:41 | In other movies, we will delve deeper into
advanced reflections and refractions and so on.
| | 03:47 | But that's a good start to looking at
the power of mia_material.
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| Bump mapping in mia_material_x| 00:00 | Bump mapping for mia material works just the same
as it does for standard shading nodes in Maya.
| | 00:06 | However, there is more than one Bump channel.
You need to add your Bump map
| | 00:11 | to the correct channel, let's take a look at that.
| | 00:13 | I am going to select my object and go
to the mia_material shading node here in
| | 00:17 | the Attribute Editor.
| | 00:18 | Scrolling down, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling
you will see there is a
| | 00:23 | section for Bump, you are going to open that up.
| | 00:25 | You'll see that there is an Overall Bump
and Standard Bump.
| | 00:30 | Admittedly, when I saw this I was
confused and I didn't know what to do here.
| | 00:35 | Overall Bump is for a specialized mental ray bump nodes.
| | 00:40 | If you just want to add an ordinary plain
vanilla Maya Bump, then you want to
| | 00:44 | add it to the Standard Bump channel here,
just like you would with any Bump Map.
| | 00:49 | Let's do another 3D texture.
| | 00:52 | I really am a fan of 3D textures because
I don't have to worry about tracking
| | 00:56 | bitmap assets and so on.
| | 00:58 | Let's try like a Volume Noise.
| | 01:02 | I want to reduce the Bump Depth
because that's always too high with a value
| | 01:05 | of 1, bring it down to let's say .1.
Normally, I would go to High Quality
| | 01:11 | rendering mode in order to see that effect of that bump.
| | 01:16 | But as you can see, mental ray materials
don't work in High Quality mode,
| | 01:20 | so that's kind of problematic.
| | 01:22 | You could try Viewport 2.0,
but as you see we still have problems.
| | 01:28 | I'm only getting the specular component currently.
| | 01:31 | What that means, of course, is that we
will have to do IPRs, go ahead and click on IPR,
| | 01:35 | drag a rectangle around the object.
| | 01:42 | We do have a Bump Map in here.
It actually is effective right now,
| | 01:46 | it's just that the scale of the noise is probably too large.
| | 01:50 | Let's increase the Bump Depth up a bit to .5.
| | 01:56 | In fact actually, it's the opposite of what I said.
The scale of the volume noise
| | 02:00 | is too small for us to see terribly well.
| | 02:03 | I could go the Volume Noise attributes
and play around with those.
| | 02:07 | There is a lot going on in here, it's kind of complicated.
| | 02:10 | The main thing is the Frequency,
that's just the scale of the noise.
| | 02:14 | I could increase the Frequency to make
the noise smaller, or I could decrease
| | 02:19 | the Frequency to make the noise larger.
There you go.
| | 02:24 | That accomplishes basically the same thing
as if I had scaled a 3D texture
| | 02:29 | placement node, but in this case
I'm not going to bother with that.
| | 02:33 | So there is Bump Mapping with mia_material_x.
| | 02:36 | Really, the only thing to keep in mind
is you want to add your bump to the
| | 02:40 | Standard Bump channel
and not the Overall Bump channel.
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| Adding ambient occlusion to mia_material_x| 00:00 | Perhaps one of the most valuable tools within
mental ray is something called Ambient Occlusion.
| | 00:08 | This is a way of achieving greater realism
because in the real world
| | 00:14 | ambient light that's scattered around
in all directions doesn't reach into the
| | 00:19 | cracks and crevices between things as well
as it reaches flat surfaces that are sort of exposed.
| | 00:26 | What that means is that things like drapery
will look much better if you use Ambient Occlusion.
| | 00:34 | There are many ways of implementing Ambient Occlusion.
| | 00:37 | What I am going to show you now is
how it's built directly into mia material.
| | 00:43 | I'll select this piece of drapery because
that's actually a really good example.
| | 00:46 | I will go ahead and assign a new material.
Right-click and Assign New Material,
| | 00:50 | mental ray materials that will be
mia_material_x_passes. Let me rename that.
| | 00:56 | I will call it drapery_mia_material_x.
| | 01:02 | I will just choose a preset,
just a matte finished preset nothing fancy.
| | 01:08 | I'll give it a red color, just give it a pretty bright red.
| | 01:13 | Now if I just render this now it's not
really going to look like much.
| | 01:18 | Go ahead and do an IPR rendering of that.
| | 01:21 | It's just a standard CG rendering,
it doesn't look like anything special.
| | 01:26 | It doesn't really catch my eye either.
It doesn't read to me as being terribly realistic.
| | 01:31 | All I have got to do now is go to that
material node, drapery_mia_material_x,
| | 01:36 | and scroll down until you find the section
that says Ambient Occlusion.
| | 01:43 | You can go ahead and turn that on.
| | 01:45 | But you won't see anything happen just by turning it on.
| | 01:48 | The way that this particular implementation
of AO works is it adds a non-physical light to the material.
| | 01:58 | That's what this ambient light color is here.
| | 02:00 | With an ambient light color of black
essentially we get no effect.
| | 02:04 | I will turn the ambient light color up to about half way.
| | 02:09 | We still don't see much here and it's actually
kind of blasting out my diffuse color.
| | 02:14 | If you do use Ambient Occlusion with
this method you'll have to decrease the
| | 02:19 | diffuse color accordingly.
| | 02:22 | Turn this ambient light color actually
up all the way and I'll reduce the
| | 02:27 | Diffuse Color down to let's say, maybe half.
| | 02:31 | We are starting to see the ambient occlusion
effect, scrolling back down again.
| | 02:37 | The other important attribute here
is the Ambient Shadow Color. I would
| | 02:41 | usually set that to black and that's
just going to increase the contrast.
| | 02:45 | Now I'm ready to increase the distance here.
This is basically a scale effect
| | 02:50 | With the distance of four we won't see much.
| | 02:53 | I'll try a distance of let's say 20 cm.
| | 02:56 | There we go, now we are starting to see
that Ambient Occlusion effect; maybe a
| | 03:00 | little bit more distance, maybe I will give it a 50.
| | 03:03 | That increases the effect maybe up
to a 100 which would be a full meter.
| | 03:09 | Didn't seem to change that much up from 50,
so I will take it back down to 50.
| | 03:14 | I will also want to increase the number
of samples because you might notice
| | 03:17 | that that's looking older grainy there.
| | 03:19 | Increase the number of samples to fight that grain factor.
| | 03:22 | If I bring it way down to like one sample,
it's going to look extremely grainy.
| | 03:28 | That's very unmistakable.
| | 03:30 | Usually about 32 or maybe 64 is a good value for that.
| | 03:34 | So that's pretty cool actually, I mean
consider the difference, if I turn
| | 03:38 | Ambient Occlusion off versus on, it's pretty dramatic actually.
| | 03:44 | So now there is one other cool trick
that we can play here with Ambient Occlusion,
| | 03:48 | which is we can get color bleeding in the mix.
| | 03:53 | On the wall next to the drapery, I would
like to see a little bit of red splash
| | 03:58 | bouncing off the drape and landing on the wall.
| | 04:01 | Currently I don't have that now.
| | 04:02 | I want to select that wall and if you're
not sure if it's selected or not you
| | 04:07 | can use the Outliner, Window>Outliner,
back_wall is the object.
| | 04:13 | I just want to, once again, right-click
and assign a new material,
| | 04:18 | that will be mia_material_x_passes.
| | 04:23 | I'll give it a diffuse color, let's choose a preset of
| | 04:28 | MatteFinish and I'll just leave the color at 50% gray.
| | 04:34 | Then go back down and enable Use Ambient Occlusion.
| | 04:37 | Turn the light color up all the way,
turn the shadow color down all the way.
| | 04:42 | Give it a distance that's similar
to the other, about 50 let's give it.
| | 04:47 | Now we are ready to test to see what we got.
I'll do another interactive production rendering.
| | 04:54 | We are getting some Ambient Occlusion here.
That's not a shadow actually.
| | 04:58 | I have disabled shadows.
| | 04:59 | That's actually just the Ambient Occlusion effect.
| | 05:02 | Maybe I can reduce the distance a little bit.
| | 05:06 | You'll see that, we can bring it back up again.
| | 05:09 | Give it some more samples so it's not so grainy.
| | 05:12 | Then finally turn on under Use Detail Distance,
turn on With color bleed.
| | 05:20 | You will want to probably do that
for both of the objects. I did see a
| | 05:24 | little bit of change. I got a little bit
of red splash there, but I can go back
| | 05:29 | to my drapery and turn on color bleed on that as well.
| | 05:32 | You can see here now it's actually
bleeding onto itself, the red light
| | 05:36 | that's bouncing off the drapery is landing on the drapery.
| | 05:40 | We could maybe play around with this
a little bit more and get a better result,
| | 05:43 | but that's the essential process of achieving the
Ambient Occlusion effect directly within mia material.
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| Using ambient occlusion nodes in shader trees| 00:00 | Ambient Occlusion is a very helpful tool
that can be used in any shader network
| | 00:06 | or shader tree for a mental ray rendering.
| | 00:09 | It's not just for the mia material.
| | 00:12 | There is a stand-alone Ambient Occlusion
node that you can use to for example,
| | 00:17 | give the effect of light being blocked to
dim the color of a surface. Let's do that.
| | 00:23 | I am going to create a new standard Lambert
shading node for this piece of molding here.
| | 00:30 | Go ahead and select that and right-click.
I can use any kind of material.
| | 00:35 | In this case I am just going to use a Lambert
and give it a diffuse color of maybe a lavender color.
| | 00:44 | I will go ahead and do a render of that
so we could see what that's going to
| | 00:49 | look like without the Ambient Occlusion shape.
| | 00:51 | So we got Ambient Occlusion here on the wall,
but we do not have any here on this piece of molding.
| | 00:57 | Go ahead and store that. I'll open up the
Hypershade and grab my Lambert, that
| | 01:07 | I have created here as lambert4, why don't we
give that a name, call that molding_lambert.
| | 01:16 | Go ahead and graph that network
and as you see it has no network.
| | 01:19 | It's just a standalone shading node.
| | 01:22 | I want to add the mental ray Ambient Occlusion node now.
| | 01:26 | I'll find that under mental ray textures
and you're looking for MIB Ambient Occlusion.
| | 01:33 | I will click that and it's created.
| | 01:37 | What I want to do is I want to connect
that to some attribute on this shader.
| | 01:42 | It is a three-point value, this Ambient
Occlusion node puts out what's known in
| | 01:47 | Maya as a vector attribute; it has
three components red, green and blue.
| | 01:52 | I really am not able to connect that
to the diffuse amount of a material.
| | 01:57 | If I select that material node you'll
see Diffuse and it's not a color swatch.
| | 02:03 | When I middle-mouse drag this over here
what's going to happen is the connection
| | 02:07 | editor is going to pop open.
| | 02:09 | So I'll middle-mouse dragging that and
releasing it and I see the connection editor.
| | 02:13 | Again the reason I'm saying this is
because the output of the ambient
| | 02:17 | occlusion node is a vector which has three values.
| | 02:21 | The thing that I drag it onto
this diffuse amount is only a single
| | 02:27 | floating-point number.
| | 02:28 | Maya doesn't know which of the three
red, green and blue channels should be
| | 02:33 | connected to the diffuse input here.
| | 02:37 | In the connection editor I'll just choose the green channel.
| | 02:40 | Open up outValue here on the left
and select outValueG and I want to connect
| | 02:45 | that to the diffuse amount here,
which is just listed as the diffuse,
| | 02:50 | go ahead and click that.
| | 02:51 | I know that's connected because
you can see this is highlighting in yellow
| | 02:54 | indicating there's an incoming connection.
We also see the icon here to take us to the input node.
| | 03:01 | So that connection has been made, go ahead
and close my Hypershade and go back
| | 03:07 | to the Render View, which I have got minimized here.
| | 03:10 | Let's do an interactive production render on that.
| | 03:13 | Go ahead and click IPR, and drag a rectangle around that.
| | 03:18 | It is working, it's just that we need to
adjust the values on the Ambient
| | 03:22 | Occlusion node; go over there and select that.
| | 03:25 | What have we got? We have got the
Bright, the Dark; those are basically
| | 03:28 | already set the way we want them.
There will be a maximum occlusion in the
| | 03:34 | crevices here because Dark is set to Black.
| | 03:38 | We've got the Max Distance, that's really the
most important one here. It's not
| | 03:42 | the spread, it's the Max Distance that
controls how far that Ambient Occlusion
| | 03:47 | effect will spread across the surface.
| | 03:51 | That's a bit misleading.
Spread and Max Distance are kind of confusing.
| | 03:56 | Max Distance is actually the spread.
| | 03:58 | It's actually how far the effect will spread across the surface.
| | 04:02 | If I reduce that you'll see the effects.
| | 04:04 | So Max Distance of 10 or Max Distance of 20
that's going to increase the effect,
| | 04:10 | where Max Distance of 100, that's too much.
Let's give it back to something like 30 or whatever.
| | 04:18 | So that's all there is to that.
The spread is actually something different.
| | 04:22 | Spread is in fact, how it's going to
look around at other surfaces in what
| | 04:28 | direction it's allowed to look.
| | 04:31 | You can increase that up to one if you want,
it just increases the contrast slightly.
| | 04:36 | I'll need to increase the number
of samples to get a better look here,
| | 04:39 | maybe 32 or 64 samples.
| | 04:42 | So I have got an Ambient Occlusion
effect happening on that surface.
| | 04:47 | Again, it's just a standard Lambert shader, nothing fancy.
| | 04:51 | You can use the Ambient Occlusion node
for lots of things. In this case, it's a
| | 04:55 | lighting effect, but you can also use
it for things like a dirt map in which
| | 05:00 | crevices are a different color than
the sort of outer surface of an object.
| | 05:05 | Really, there's a lot of options with
Ambient Occlusion. It's all based upon
| | 05:09 | distance. It's just looking at whether
there's a nearby surface. If there is
| | 05:14 | a nearby surface within that Max Distance, then
the Ambient Occlusion node will output a darker color.
| | 05:21 | So that's a little bit about Ambient Occlusion.
That concludes the chapter on Mental Ray materials.
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|
|
4. Glossy and Reflective SurfacesMapping specular color| 00:00 | In this chapter, we'll be looking
at glossy and reflective surfaces.
| | 00:05 | The first thing I would like to
share with you is how to achieve a
| | 00:09 | non-uniform specularity, in other words,
so that an object will not be uniformly
| | 00:14 | specular or not have a constant
highlight across the entire surface.
| | 00:18 | We're going to map the Specular component.
| | 00:22 | To do that, I'll add a Blinn Shader to
the tablecloth here; select it,
| | 00:26 | right-click and choose Assign New Material
and I'm going to assign a
| | 00:31 | Blinn material node and in the Attribute Editor,
I just want to rename that tablecloth_blinn.
| | 00:38 | To make it a little bit easier for us to
see what we're doing, I'm going to copy
| | 00:42 | the Attribute Editor off to its own tab.
| | 00:44 | I've got the tablecloth_blinn
node visible and I'll click Copy Tab.
| | 00:49 | The reason I'm doing that is because,
now I can deselect the tablecloth
| | 00:54 | so I don't have the selection highlighting
and I can still work on the shading gear
| | 01:00 | and close the Attribute Editor.
| | 01:01 | So what do we want to do in here?
| | 01:04 | Well, I want to just give it a Diffuse color,
first of all. Click on Color and
| | 01:09 | give it a lavender color and maybe
increase the Diffuse amount a little bit as
| | 01:13 | I always do and scroll down to refresh
your memory, how specularity works in this
| | 01:19 | Blinn Shader here. Eccentricity is the
spread of the highlight and Specular Roll
| | 01:24 | Off is the intensity of the highlight.
| | 01:27 | We won't always see all of those effects here
in the viewport unless we have a
| | 01:32 | different rendering mode.
| | 01:33 | I'm just in the default quality of rendering mode here.
| | 01:36 | For this exercise, I'm going to use Viewport 2.0.
That will give us a better
| | 01:41 | approximation of what we'll
see when we do a proper render.
| | 01:45 | Now I want to map the Specular Color.
| | 01:49 | In Maya, the Specular Color attribute
is the one that we want to map if we want
| | 01:53 | to vary the specularity across the surface.
| | 01:57 | I'll go to the Create Render Node button,
click on that. I've got a File
| | 02:01 | node that I want to create, click
on File and I want to go to the file
| | 02:06 | attributes. Since I've got this tab
open here, I'll need to click to open
| | 02:11 | the Attribute Editor once again.
I've got my file attributes visible and I
| | 02:16 | can browse and then, I just simply want
to choose this one here, I've got in my
| | 02:22 | sourceimages folder already, pattern_
seamless_victorian_black_and_white_invert,
| | 02:28 | click and open that.
| | 02:29 | Now in order to see the texture in the
Viewport, of course, I'll need to press
| | 02:33 | the 6 key. There you go, we have got
specular mapping. You'll notice that
| | 02:39 | as I navigate around and tumble around
in my scene, the specular highlights are
| | 02:46 | changing as we looked at it from
different angles having to do, of course,
| | 02:51 | with the lighting and if I press the 7 key
to see the lighting that I've created in
| | 02:56 | this shot. Now we get an even better
idea of what this will look like, cool.
| | 03:01 | So all that remains here then is to
play around with the Eccentricity and
| | 03:05 | Specular Roll Off to get a believable result.
| | 03:11 | If I want to tile that texture across
the surface, I want to go back to the
| | 03:15 | Attribute Editor and I want to go to
place2dtexture node and increase the Repeat
| | 03:22 | UV value to may be let's say, 3 and 3.
| | 03:25 | So I've mapped the intensity of the specular highlights.
| | 03:29 | This particular map is monochrome.
| | 03:31 | If the map had a saturation, then we would
see that in the specular highlights as well.
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| Adding reflectivity with raytracing| 00:00 | To get a mirror reflection or a reflective
surface in the Maya software
| | 00:06 | renderer, you want to add a material that
has a Specular component like a Blinn
| | 00:11 | Shader. You'll also need to enable
Raytracing in the Render Settings dialog.
| | 00:16 | I'll go ahead and add a Blinn material
to this candelabra base here.
| | 00:20 | I'll right-click and choose Assign New
Material and from the Assign New Material
| | 00:25 | dialog choose Blinn and here
I've got the Attribute Editor open.
| | 00:29 | I'm just going to reduce the Diffuse Color a bit.
| | 00:32 | This will make it a little bit clear
for us to see what's going on.
| | 00:36 | If I do a rendering now, it will just look black.
| | 00:40 | We don't have any mirror reflections yet.
| | 00:43 | But if you look in the material attributes,
if you scroll down to Specular
| | 00:47 | Shading, you'll see reflectivity has a
value of 0.5, but I don't currently see
| | 00:52 | any mirror reflections there.
| | 00:53 | Let's get in a little bit closer, so we
can see that a little bit more clearly.
| | 01:00 | I'll go to the Render Settings dialog
and go to the Maya Software tab and
| | 01:04 | scroll down. You're looking for the
Raytracing Quality section. You'll need to
| | 01:08 | open that up and enable Raytracing.
That's going to globally enable
| | 01:13 | Raytracing which will achieve reflections
as well as Raytrace shadows.
| | 01:19 | I want to mention in passing that just
changing the Quality setting up here will
| | 01:24 | not enable the Raytrace engine.
| | 01:26 | In other words, it doesn't matter which
anti-aliasing quality preset you choose,
| | 01:31 | the Raytracing Quality options are dealt with separately.
| | 01:36 | So Raytracing is now on, we do have
another rendering, we should start to see
| | 01:40 | some mirror reflections in there, and there you go.
| | 01:42 | You see some mirror reflections in that surface.
| | 01:45 | Reflectivity is enabled for all Blinn materials
in Maya. That might bite you,
| | 01:51 | if you're not careful.
| | 01:53 | You don't always want a mirror reflection
in a Specular component.
| | 01:58 | For example, my tablecloth here is
currently reflecting the environment.
| | 02:02 | If you look closely, you'll see that
there's a little bit of a change in the
| | 02:06 | specularity here, or if I tumble around
to a different point of view, we might
| | 02:11 | be able to see that a little bit more clearly,
that the tablecloth is actually
| | 02:15 | mirroring the environment. That's
simply because I did not turn Reflectivity
| | 02:20 | off for the tablecloth.
| | 02:23 | You can see the reflection kind
of dimly here, but it is there.
| | 02:26 | I'll store that image, go back to
the tablecloth, back to its shader,
| | 02:33 | tablecloth_blinn, and turn the
Reflectivity down to zero. So that's turned off.
| | 02:40 | I'll do just another render,
so we can see the difference there.
| | 02:44 | In this rendering, Raytracing is enabled.
We can see there's a mirror
| | 02:48 | reflection here in the candelabra.
| | 02:49 | But we don't see a reflection here in
the tablecloth because I have disabled
| | 02:55 | Reflectivity locally on that material.
| | 02:58 | If I go back to a previously saved image,
you can see the difference there.
| | 03:01 | We have mirror reflections in the tablecloth
versus no mirror reflections.
| | 03:07 | That's the basics of how reflectivity works
with the Maya software renderer.
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| Setting raytracing depth| 00:00 | When working with reflections, it's important
to pay attention to the raytrace depths.
| | 00:05 | That's the limit on the number of times
a light ray is permitted to
| | 00:10 | bounce back and forth
between reflective surfaces.
| | 00:13 | If the raytrace limit is too high,
then you will have a slow render.
| | 00:19 | If the ray trace limit is too low,
then you might see black spots on surfaces
| | 00:25 | or just missing reflections in general.
| | 00:27 | This setting is controlled in two places.
| | 00:30 | First, in the render settings, and then second
in each of these shading nodes themselves.
| | 00:36 | Let's go into the Render Settings first.
| | 00:38 | I'll click on the Render Settings window button,
go to Maya Software tab, scroll down.
| | 00:44 | You are looking for Raytracing Quality
and open that up and you'll see
| | 00:48 | Reflections has a value of 10 and that
means that a light ray is permitted to
| | 00:53 | bounce 10 times back and forth between
surfaces. That's actually a really high value.
| | 00:58 | In practice you'll never really need 10 reflections,
usually 5 or 6 is all you'll ever need.
| | 01:06 | However, you can leave this at 10,
because you can simply limit the number of
| | 01:10 | rays on a per material basis.
| | 01:12 | I'll select one of these guys and hit Ctrl+A
to open up the Attribute Editor.
| | 01:17 | I've assigned this chrome blinn material
to the candelabra and the bowl.
| | 01:24 | Go into raytrace options here and you
will see the Reflection Limit is currently
| | 01:28 | set to 1, and that is the default.
| | 01:31 | Let's see what that looks like if I render it.
| | 01:34 | Here we see the result with a Reflection Limit of 1.
| | 01:38 | The surfaces are permitted to reflect
their environment, but they're not able to
| | 01:43 | reflect themselves and they are
not able to reflect one another.
| | 01:46 | Let me store that and increase the Reflection
Limit to 2 and do another rendering.
| | 01:55 | If we move between these two renders,
we can see the difference here.
| | 01:59 | I'm moving the little scrollbar here
at the bottom of the render view.
| | 02:03 | This is with a Reflection Limit of 1
and that's a Reflection Limit of 2,
| | 02:09 | and you can see the difference here.
| | 02:11 | These reflective surfaces are able to reflect
one another and they're also able to self reflect.
| | 02:18 | Store that and I'll set the Reflection
Limit up to 3 and give it another render.
| | 02:26 | Now you see with a Reflection Limit of 3
and then that's a Reflection Limit of 2
| | 02:32 | and Reflection Limit of 1.
| | 02:34 | Once again, that's 1, 2, and 3.
| | 02:37 | 2 and 3, look very similar.
| | 02:40 | All we saw was a little bit of reflection here
and that was really the only difference,
| | 02:44 | may be a little bit there.
| | 02:48 | As you can see, we really don't need to push
the Reflection Limit any higher than this.
| | 02:51 | I said earlier that a value of 5 or 6 is all you'll ever need.
| | 02:56 | That's especially if you've got lots of reflective objects.
| | 02:59 | In this particular scene I'm okay with
the Reflection Limit of only 2.
| | 03:04 | Pretty much I wouldn't be able to tell the
difference between a value of 2 and
| | 03:08 | anything higher than that.
| | 03:09 | That's how you set the Reflection Trace Depth
for the Maya Software Renderer.
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| Shaping anisotropic highlights| 00:00 | For some kinds of reflective surfaces,
a Blinn Material is really not going to
| | 00:06 | give you a really good shiny highlight.
| | 00:09 | This is especially true for curved surfaces
or certain types of reflective surfaces like hair.
| | 00:16 | In those cases you want a streaked highlight
and the blinn shader is not capable of providing that.
| | 00:22 | A blinn material will always give you a round highlight.
| | 00:26 | By the way of demonstration, I'll select
the candelabra base here and assign a
| | 00:30 | new shader to it, just a blinn material,
just to illustrate my point.
| | 00:35 | You'll see I've got a round highlight there.
I'll increase the Specular Roll
| | 00:40 | Off and Color to make it stronger and
reduce the Eccentricity a little bit.
| | 00:45 | Do a render with that and we've got
Reflectivity in the mix here. I'm just going
| | 00:50 | to turn that off, just make a little bit clearer.
| | 00:53 | What you're seeing here are round highlights
on that surface. It would look
| | 00:58 | much better actually if we had a highlight
that kind of followed the contours of the
| | 01:03 | surface and that's called Anisotropic Highlight.
| | 01:07 | Isotropy means round basically,
and Anisotropic means not round.
| | 01:13 | I'm going to create a new material.
That's going to be in Anisotropic Shader.
| | 01:20 | It's very similar to the blinn shader,
except it can give you non-round highlights.
| | 01:24 | I'll click on that and you can see in the
sample slot here already I am getting
| | 01:30 | an interesting kind of swirly look there to that highlight.
| | 01:34 | I want to reduce the reflection amount,
so we can just see the highlights.
| | 01:38 | To do that I'll turn this switch off,
the one that says as Anisotropic Reflectivity.
| | 01:42 | I'll turn the Reflectivity down all the way and turn
| | 01:47 | the Specular Color up all the way,
so we can see the effect very clearly.
| | 01:51 | Open up my Render View again, store the
previous image, this is the one with the
| | 01:57 | blinn material on it, and we'll do a new rendering.
| | 02:00 | So we get a streaked highlight now.
That's the blinn material and that's the end
| | 02:06 | Anisotropic Material.
| | 02:08 | I can just adjust some of these values here,
maybe I'll just bring the
| | 02:12 | color down to make it even clearer what's
going on. You see there are Spread
| | 02:16 | X and Spread Y, and Roughness, and Fresnel Index.
| | 02:21 | Spread is basically how focused the
highlight is in each of the two dimensions.
| | 02:27 | If a low Spread Y and a high spread X,
I should see a pretty strong highlight.
| | 02:34 | There you so, so that's a bit too strong,
but that does illustrate my point.
| | 02:39 | May be I'll reduce the Spread X a little bit.
| | 02:43 | The Fresnel Index, it's named after a
famous Physicist by the name of Frenel,
| | 02:48 | and that's basically the intensity.
| | 02:51 | If I reduce that down, you'll see we don't get much.
| | 02:56 | Do a quick render of that, maybe
we'll just do a region render.
| | 03:00 | See you can see with the low Fresnel index,
we're just getting a kind of a blurry highlight.
| | 03:07 | That's also interacting with the Roughness factor here.
If I reduce that roughness, then it will
bring that highlight better into focus.
| | 03:18 | All of these will interact with one another.
| | 03:20 | You just want to try to feel your way through
using the sample swatch up here to
| | 03:26 | give you a general idea of what it might
look like, and then do a proper render.
| | 03:32 | As you can see the Anisotropic Highlights
look a lot better than the standard Blinn Highlights.
| | 03:38 | Let's go back to that blinn image.
All I would need to do is really adjust
| | 03:44 | these values until I can kind of
get it artistically the way I want it.
| | 03:53 | That's how you work with Anisotropic Highlights
in the Maya Software Renderer.
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| Creating brushed metal with a bump map| 00:00 | To achieve the effect of brushed metal,
what you want to do is use up a bump map.
| | 00:06 | We are trying to simulate the look of micro-fine
scratches in the surface of the metal.
| | 00:13 | Here's what my rendering looks like without the bump map.
| | 00:16 | I'll go ahead and open up my Render View.
This is just the Anisotropic Shader
| | 00:21 | with no bump map on it. I want
to store that image to compare it.
| | 00:26 | Select the object, go to the Attribute Editor,
Ctrl+A, if it's not already open
| | 00:31 | and go to the shading node.
| | 00:33 | I just want to add a bump map to this.
| | 00:36 | I'm going to click to create a New Render Node.
| | 00:38 | In this case, I want to use a 2D procedural texture.
| | 00:43 | The reason that I want to use a 2D texture
is that it will follow the UVs of the model.
| | 00:49 | I've done the UV layout on these objects.
| | 00:52 | In other words, the texture coordinates
are done on this and if I used a 3D texture,
| | 00:58 | then it would be more difficult for me
to make the brush pattern follow
| | 01:03 | the contours of the surface, because a
3D texture operates in basically in world space,
| | 01:09 | rather than in UV space.
| | 01:12 | That's why I want to use a 2D texture,
instead of a 3D texture, in this case.
| | 01:17 | Click on 2D textures and I'm just going
to use a 2D noise texture, for the bump map.
| | 01:22 | You can see it's got a Depth of 1,
that's obviously going to be way too strong.
| | 01:27 | Let's take a look at what that looks like if I do a quick render.
| | 01:32 | That's what we get from the noise texture
by default with a Bump Depth of 1.
| | 01:37 | The first thing I want to do actually here
is of course reduce the Bump Depth.
| | 01:41 | Let's set that down to may be .2 and do another rendering.
| | 01:47 | Now that doesn't look like brushed metal,
but all we need to do is adjust the tiling
| | 01:52 | and play around a little bit with the
noise texture to make it look better.
| | 01:57 | To get to the tiling, I want to go to the 2D
texture placement node, and that's
| | 02:02 | one of the inputs here. That means one
way to get there is just by clicking on
| | 02:08 | go to the input node here, that's going to take me
up the shader tree, until I finally get to a leaf.
| | 02:15 | In other words, one of the original input nodes.
| | 02:18 | place2dTexture is here, and I've got Repeat UV,
and I'm going to set the repeats
| | 02:26 | here in order to stretch that bump map across the surface.
| | 02:31 | I'll leave the U Repeat value at 1.
I'll set to the V value way down to,
| | 02:36 | let's say .01, do another rendering,
see what that looks like.
| | 02:42 | Now it's stretched, and you see
I've got it stretching up and down.
| | 02:46 | If I want to stretch in the other direction,
of course, I can set these values the other way.
| | 02:51 | I can set Repeat U to .01 and repeat V to 1,
do another render.
| | 03:00 | We're getting there, it's looking pretty good.
| | 03:02 | All I really want to do now is play around
with the noise texture a bit, because
| | 03:05 | I think that we're getting too much variation.
| | 03:08 | I'll go back to the output nodes here
and there is my noise texture.
| | 03:13 | I just want to reduce the Amplitude a
little bit and based upon this Sample
| | 03:17 | swatch here, I can determine whether
I'm getting the right contrast or not.
| | 03:22 | Additionally, what I would like to do is
have finer lines and to do that,
| | 03:27 | one way I can do that is to increase the
Depth Macs, what that's going to do is
| | 03:32 | reiterate the noise algorithm more
than once and we'll essentially get lines
| | 03:37 | inside of lines with a higher Depth max.
Do another render, and I think we're where
| | 03:44 | we want to be with the actual texture. I just
think I need a little bit less of a Bump Depth.
| | 03:50 | I'll go to the Output Node here, here is my
bump2d and I'll just reduce that down to .1 or so.
| | 03:55 | That's our brushed metal effect using a bump map.
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| Controlling the bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF)| 00:00 | To get the best results from metal materials,
you want to simulate an optical phenomenon
| | 00:05 | known as BRDF and that stands for
the Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function.
| | 00:14 | A bit of a mouthful, but all it is,
is just a representation of how shiny
| | 00:20 | surfaces react to light in the real world.
| | 00:23 | When you look at a shiny object,
whether that be metal or even water or glass,
| | 00:29 | the reflections will actually be stronger
on the edges of that object and the
| | 00:35 | BRDF effect is stimulated in Maya in various ways.
| | 00:40 | The simplest way for us to do that is
with the mia material shader with mental ray.
| | 00:46 | I'm going to open up my Render Settings
and choose mental ray as my renderer.
| | 00:53 | I'm going to select the object, right-click
and assign a new material and
| | 00:57 | I'll just use the mental ray mia_material_X_passes;
| | 01:04 | go to that material and I'm just going
to choose a preset here;
| | 01:09 | the Copper preset works well in this case.
| | 01:12 | I'll replace all those attribute values
with those from the copper preset and
| | 01:17 | let's do a rendering of that.
| | 01:21 | Here it is with just default values.
I'm going to go ahead and save that image.
| | 01:27 | Let's go and play around with BRDF section here
in themia_material_x_passes shader.
| | 01:34 | What you'll see here, is a 0 degree
reflection and 90 degree reflection.
| | 01:39 | That means how reflective is the surface,
whether it's pointed towards the view
| | 01:44 | or at 90 degrees to the view.
| | 01:48 | It will be a lot easier for us to see
if I go back up into the Reflections
| | 01:53 | section and set the glossiness up
all the way. I'll do another rendering.
| | 01:59 | With the default BRDF values,
we won't see a huge difference.
| | 02:03 | You can kind of see it's a little bit brighter on the edges.
| | 02:07 | Let's scroll down and we'll really exaggerate this by
reducing the 0 degree reflection down to 0 and render.
| | 02:15 | Now what we see here now is that
the faces that are pointed towards the
| | 02:22 | camera are rendering as nearly black,
because there's almost no diffused component here.
| | 02:28 | Any edges are highlighted; and that's the BRDF effect.
| | 02:33 | I can play around with this curve
to accentuate that or reduce the effect.
| | 02:40 | So if I have a low value to the BRDF curve,
what we'll see is it's going to kind of spread out more.
| | 02:47 | We're seeing more of a spread here.
If I have a high BRDF curve value,
| | 02:53 | essentially, we're just going to
only highlight the extreme edges.
| | 03:00 | To that point we can barely even see the effect.
| | 03:03 | So you can do this by hand, manually, and play
around with this and get the look that you want;
| | 03:11 | that's one approach.
| | 03:14 | The other approach is to use some sort of
physically accurate and automatic
| | 03:19 | version of BRDF and if you to do that you'll
enable the switch that says Use Fresnel Reflection.
| | 03:26 | When you enable that, these manual attributes are disabled.
| | 03:31 | Let's see what that looks like by default
with Use Fresnel Reflection turned on.
| | 03:34 | You'll see it doesn't look like much.
| | 03:37 | The secret here is that the Fresnel Reflection
relies upon the index of refraction for the material.
| | 03:46 | That seems a little bit non-intuitive,
but it's there so that the material
| | 03:51 | will be physically accurate for both glass and metal.
| | 03:57 | The index of refraction is the amount
that light is bent as it moves from one
| | 04:02 | transparent medium to another.
That's going to be found actually in the
| | 04:06 | Refraction section up here.
| | 04:08 | Index of Refraction is set to 1.4 and that's somewhere
between the refractive index of glass and water.
| | 04:17 | To get a metal effect, what I want is
actually a fractional Index of Refraction.
| | 04:24 | If the IOR was set to a value of 1,
that would behave like air.
| | 04:29 | If it has a value less than 1,
then it will behave like a metal.
| | 04:33 | In fact, I would just actually reduce the IOR down
to as low as it will go, value of 0.1.
| | 04:38 | With Use Fresnel Reflection turned on, we should
see a physically accurate result to the metal here.
| | 04:49 | It is more reflective on the edges
and less reflective in the center.
| | 04:54 | That's how you use BRDF for metal materials,
using mental rays' mia_material_X.
| | 05:02 | That's our chapter on glossy and reflective surfaces.
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|
|
5. Transparency and TranslucenceRendering refractions| 00:00 | One of the most essential techniques
in shader network creation is building a
| | 00:06 | working glass shader. We are going
to learn about that in this chapter.
| | 00:11 | That will apply actually to other software
besides Maya because the principles are all the same.
| | 00:16 | I'll start by a assigning a Blinn material
to my martini glass, select it and
| | 00:22 | right-click and choose Assign New
Material, that will be a Blinn Shader.
| | 00:25 | I just want to change up a couple of
these attributes, so let me rename this.
| | 00:30 | I'll call it glass_blinn and just play
around with some of the basic attributes first.
| | 00:37 | The color should be almost black.
| | 00:40 | I am going to bring that Diffuse Color
down to nearly nothing.
| | 00:43 | Glass doesn't really have a diffused reflection,
because it's very highly polished.
| | 00:50 | Transparency, I want to increase that up
to maybe about .9 or something like that.
| | 00:54 | Then I want to just give it a little bit
better highlight here, a very
| | 01:00 | small, but intense highlight.
I'll reduce the Eccentricity and increase the
| | 01:05 | Specular Roll Off up to a value of one.
| | 01:08 | I'll render it out and see what it is looks like.
| | 01:11 | Here it is, with no refractions.
| | 01:13 | Refractions are the bending of light as
it passes through a transparent medium.
| | 01:20 | Currently we have no refractions and so we don't
have a very good look to our glass shader just yet.
| | 01:26 | We'll need to turn Refractions on,
scrolling down a bit and I can turn
| | 01:32 | Refractions on, but if I render, I still
won't see the refractions.
| | 01:37 | The reason is, once again, that the Raytracer
is globally disabled by default in Maya.
| | 01:43 | I want to go into the Render Settings window,
the Maya Software tab and under
| | 01:48 | Raytracing Quality just enable Raytracing.
| | 01:51 | While we are here, we
can see the trace depth limits.
| | 01:54 | We are only able to get one reflection
by default, where we are getting
| | 01:59 | six refractions, that means a light ray is able to bend
six times through a transparent medium.
| | 02:04 | I am just going to bump the Reflections up to two.
I'll leave Refractions at 6 and that should be fine.
| | 02:09 | Let's see what we get when we rendered now.
| | 02:13 | We are still not seeing refractions, we get our reflections.
| | 02:16 | You can see there is a little bit shiny
reflection on there, but we are still
| | 02:19 | not seeing the refractions because the
final part of this is we need to play
| | 02:23 | around with the Refractive Index.
| | 02:26 | That's the amount that light is allowed to bend
as it travels through a transparent medium.
| | 02:32 | A Refractive Index or index of refraction
of one corresponds to air.
| | 02:39 | What that means, in this case, is that
the light is not bending at all because the
| | 02:45 | material is being considered to be the same density as air.
| | 02:50 | What I am going to do is increase the
Refractive Index or index of refraction.
| | 02:55 | The index of refraction for normal glass
is 1.5; go ahead and do a render of that.
| | 03:02 | There we are getting our refractions.
| | 03:04 | Now if you want to spend a little bit more
on our martini glasses, we can
| | 03:08 | actually use leaded glass and that would
actually have some greater Refractive
| | 03:12 | Index of about 1.7; see if we
can see the difference here.
| | 03:18 | That's a refractive index of 1.5; you
see here and 1.7, which just means it's a
| | 03:25 | little bit denser and I think it looks a bit better.
| | 03:28 | That's how we can add refractions
in the Maya Software renderer.
| | 03:33 | We'll also play around with the reflectivity
based upon face angle.
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| Finding the facing ratio with Sampler Info| 00:00 | We have got a pretty good start on our Glass Shader here.
| | 00:03 | We have got reflections and refractions.
| | 00:06 | What I would like to do is to modulate
the reflectivity to simulate the
| | 00:12 | BRDF phenomenon, which is the
Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function,
| | 00:17 | in which surfaces are more highly reflective
on the edges than they are in the center.
| | 00:26 | Now I can do that of course with mia_material_x
in mental ray, but now we are
| | 00:32 | going to do it in Maya Software
using a couple of utility notes.
| | 00:36 | The first thing I'm going to do is find
the facingRatio of the surface with the
| | 00:41 | Maya utility node, called Sampler Info.
| | 00:44 | That's going to pass the angle of the face
to the shader. In other words, if
| | 00:50 | the face is pointing towards the camera,
one value will be passed to the shader
| | 00:55 | and if the faces are pointed at 90 degrees
away from the camera, a different
| | 00:59 | value will be passed to the shader. All right.
| | 01:02 | So we'll do this in Hypershade window,
rendering editor is Hypershade,
| | 01:09 | Here is my glass_blinn material.
I'll right-click and graph that network.
| | 01:13 | I'll also hit Ctrl+A to open up the
Attribute Editor so we can see the
| | 01:18 | connections as we make them.
| | 01:20 | Now I need to find the utility node,
that's going to be on Maya utility node.
| | 01:25 | Let's see here, Utilities and I'm
looking for Sampler Info, so I'll scroll down
| | 01:31 | to the Ss, Sampler Info.
| | 01:33 | Click on that and it's created and I
want to connect that to glass_blinn.
| | 01:38 | One way I can do that is select
the glass_blinn material node and in
| | 01:43 | the Attribute Editor, I can middle-mouse
drag the Sampler Info node onto Reflectivity.
| | 01:49 | Maya doesn't know which of the many
sampler info node attributes should be
| | 01:54 | connected to reflectivity, so I'll
have to do that in the Connection Editor,
| | 01:59 | which is popped up automatically.
| | 02:01 | Your Connection Editor might look a
little bit different than mine because I've
| | 02:05 | chosen to list the attributes in
alphabetical order from the Options here,
| | 02:10 | Options>Attribute Order>Alphabetical.
| | 02:13 | I want to connect the facingRatio to
the reflectivity. To do that I'll click on
| | 02:18 | facingRatio, on the Output node here
which is Sampler Info and I'll find
| | 02:24 | Reflectivity here on the Input node,
which is my Blinn Shader.
| | 02:28 | Here is Reflectivity.
| | 02:29 | When I click that, the connection is made.
You can see it here, it's
| | 02:33 | highlighted in yellow in the numeric field,
meaning there's an incoming
| | 02:36 | connection and we've also got go to
Input node button now. All right!
| | 02:43 | Let's do a render of that, see what it
looks like and if we scrub through here
| | 02:48 | and look at the two versions,
we see a subtle difference here.
| | 02:52 | This is the version with no facingRatio
in which the reflectivity is constant
| | 02:58 | across the surface. Then this
one is the one where we've added the
| | 03:02 | facingRatio with the Sampler Info node.
| | 03:05 | This rendering shows the effect with
the Sampler Info node connected.
| | 03:11 | What you'll notice here is that, in fact, it's
the inverse of what we want.
| | 03:16 | It's more reflective here in the center
and less reflective on the edges.
| | 03:20 | If I scrub pass through these
two versions, you can see that.
| | 03:25 | The facingRatio is going to cause the faces
that are pointed towards the camera
| | 03:31 | to have a higher reflectivity by default.
| | 03:34 | We can change that and we'll do that in another movie
in which we add a utility node called Remap Value.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Modifying transparency with Remap Value| 00:00 | Our build your own glass shader is coming along.
| | 00:04 | We've got the Facing Ratio mapped onto
the Reflectivity, but currently we're
| | 00:08 | getting the inverse result of what we want.
| | 00:11 | The desired result is that the surface
should be more highly reflective on
| | 00:16 | the edges and less reflective in the center.
We're currently seeing opposite of that.
| | 00:21 | We can easily invert the Facing Ratio
using a Maya Utility Node called Remap Value.
| | 00:27 | I'll go to Hypershade and I've got
the Attribute Editor open as well.
| | 00:35 | I'll right-click on my glass_blinn shader
and graph its network.
| | 00:39 | With a samplerInfo's facing ratio
directly piped into the reflectivity,
| | 00:45 | we're seeing more highly reflective surface in
the center and less reflective on the edges.
| | 00:51 | To invert this, I'll use a Remap Value node.
| | 00:54 | Go to the Create section here in the Hypershade.
| | 00:57 | I'm looking for Utilities and we're looking for Remap Value.
| | 01:04 | Here it is, Remap Value.
| | 01:06 | Click on that to create it.
| | 01:08 | I just want to pipe the samplerInfo's
facing ratio through the Remap Value.
| | 01:14 | With that remapValue selected, I can
middle-mouse drag the samplerInfo on to
| | 01:20 | this Input Value field here.
| | 01:22 | I will get the Connection Editor popping up,
and I want to connect the
| | 01:27 | facingRatio to the InputValue.
| | 01:30 | So that's connected.
| | 01:33 | I want to break the existing connection here.
| | 01:35 | Samplerinfo is also feeding into
glass_blinn reflectivity, so I want to
| | 01:41 | delete that connection.
| | 01:42 | Select it, press the Delete key on the keyboard.
| | 01:46 | Select that blinn shading node.
I want to middle-mouse drag the remapValue
| | 01:51 | onto the Reflectivity, middle-mouse drag.
| | 01:55 | So now, that's been done.
| | 01:57 | The connections of all been made.
We just need to invert the values.
| | 02:02 | I'll go to the remapValue node.
You've got two sections here.
| | 02:06 | You've got Value and Color and these are both outputs.
| | 02:12 | The Value section here is a single
floating-point number and that's the
| | 02:17 | section that we need here.
| | 02:19 | In other words, the facing ratio is just a single number.
| | 02:21 | It's not a 3pt vector attribute like a color.
| | 02:24 | To invert the Value, I'll play around with this graph here.
| | 02:28 | Just simply pull this point up to the top
and pull this point down to the bottom
| | 02:34 | and now I just inverted the reflectivity.
| | 02:39 | Let's see what that looks like in my
Render View back up again.
| | 02:42 | Make sure I've stored the previous version, so
we can compare them and do another rendering.
| | 02:50 | This is the version where I've inverted the facing ratio.
| | 02:55 | This is the version that has not been inverted.
| | 02:58 | So with the inverted facing ratio we're
seeing highlights on the edges, because
| | 03:03 | it's more reflective on the edges
according to the BRDF function.
| | 03:07 | The other thing that BRDF does is
actually increase the transparency for
| | 03:12 | surfaces that are pointed towards the viewer.
| | 03:16 | I want it to be more transparent here in
the center and more opaque on the edges.
| | 03:22 | I can do that with the Hypershade, just
with the shading network that I already have.
| | 03:27 | Reopen Hypershade, reselect that
remapValue node to point out that I've got
| | 03:33 | this Color section here.
| | 03:35 | The Color output is independent of the Value output.
| | 03:39 | The remapValue node has a single input,
but it has two outputs: a floating-point
| | 03:45 | output and a vector output with three values.
| | 03:49 | That means, I can just take that same
remapValue node and connect it to the
| | 03:54 | glass_blinn's transparency shader.
| | 03:56 | I don't actually need to create a second remapValue node.
| | 04:00 | I'll select the glass_blinn material.
I just want to middle-mouse drag the
| | 04:05 | remapValue node onto the Transparency
and that connection has being made.
| | 04:09 | You'll see that Maya has combined the connections here.
| | 04:12 | If I hover my mouse, you'll see it says
remapValue1.outValue is going to
| | 04:17 | reflectivity and outColor is going to transparency.
| | 04:23 | In fact, the Color here is basically
set up the way that I wanted.
| | 04:28 | It's not inverted, but I can adjust and probably make it better.
| | 04:31 | Let's see what we've got.
| | 04:33 | Go back to my Render view.
| | 04:34 | Make sure I've stored that and do another
render to compare the difference.
| | 04:41 | So there it is with the remapValue
Color output feeding into the blinn's
| | 04:47 | transparency, so that it's more
transparent in the center and less
| | 04:51 | transparent on the edges.
| | 04:54 | Compare that with the version
before I made that connection.
| | 05:00 | We're almost finished here.
| | 05:02 | All we need to do is adjust this
Color ramp here in the remapValue node.
| | 05:06 | What I want is a greater degree of transparency
throughout, and to do that,
| | 05:12 | I can move this flag over closer and
this is just saying the object is mostly
| | 05:18 | transparent, except for at the edge.
| | 05:21 | Go ahead and store that rendering; do a new render.
| | 05:26 | Now, you'll see that we're getting
very strident look to this and we can
| | 05:32 | kind of dim that down a little bit.
| | 05:34 | Maybe I'll select this Color flag here
and reduce its brightness a bit, so we'll
| | 05:40 | have a little bit of opacity, it
won't be completely transparent.
| | 05:47 | So that's a pretty good glass shader.
| | 05:50 | We can go back of course and adjust
any of those parameters to get the
| | 05:53 | result that we want.
| | 05:54 | But the basic principle here is to find
this facing ratio and plug that into
| | 05:59 | the transparency. Also find the
facing ratio and invert it and plug that
| | 06:05 | into the Reflectivity, and that's your build your own
glass shader using the Maya Software Renderer.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Rendering solid glass with mia_material_x| 00:00 | We've seen how to build our own
glass shader from Maya Software.
| | 00:04 | If you want to render in mental ray,
you have the option of using mia material
| | 00:09 | and it's got a preset for solid glass.
| | 00:12 | Let's take a look at that.
| | 00:13 | First thing, of course, I want to do is
to activate mental ray as my renderer,
| | 00:17 | going to the Render Settings and
choose mental ray as my renderer.
| | 00:22 | In the Quality section I want to turn
he Quality Preset up to Production.
| | 00:29 | What that's going to do is increase
the amount of samples, it's also going
| | 00:33 | to increase the Raytrace limits here.
| | 00:36 | I just want to knock the number of samples
down one notch to a Max Sample Level of 1,
| | 00:42 | just so that my interactive production
renderers won't be quite so slow.
| | 00:46 | So I've setup the renderer and
now I want to assign the material.
| | 00:51 | I'll select the object, right-click
and choose Assign New Material.
| | 00:55 | It's going to be a mental ray
material, mia_material_x_passes.
| | 01:01 | I go to that shader, let me give this a name.
| | 01:07 | I'll call it glass_mia_material.
| | 01:08 | Now I'll choose the Preset, hold on the
Presets button and you'll see there are
| | 01:13 | multiple versions of Glass here.
| | 01:16 | The one we want in this case is GlassSolid.
| | 01:17 | We're just going to render it quicker than GlassPhysical.
| | 01:23 | It's going to look good and it's not
going to be physically accurate,
| | 01:27 | but it will be close enough.
Choose that GlassSolid>Replace.
| | 01:33 | Without having changed any of the attributes
let's take a look at what that renders as.
| | 01:37 | What we see here now is a tinted
glass effect, that's pretty nice.
| | 01:43 | Let's turn that into just a standard ordinary glass.
| | 01:48 | I'll store that image for comparison.
Go back to my material and I want to
| | 01:52 | scroll down looking in the Refraction section.
| | 01:56 | It's got the default IOR, Index of Refraction of 1.5;
| | 02:00 | I do want to turn that up a little bit to 1.7.
| | 02:03 | That will give the effect of leaded glass.
| | 02:06 | It's a little bit denser and will bend light a little bit more.
| | 02:09 | The tinting is coming from this Refraction Color here.
| | 02:12 | I'll just click on that color swatch.
I'll set that to white, and we'll do
| | 02:16 | another render, see what it looks like.
| | 02:20 | Not bad at all and it didn't take
very long to get that set up.
| | 02:23 | We can play around with this a little bit more.
We can scroll down a bit.
| | 02:30 | You've got to the BRDF section and
that's Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution
| | 02:36 | Function once again and you'll see
Use Fresnel Reflection is enabled.
| | 02:41 | What that means is it's going to
look at your Index of Refraction to
| | 02:45 | determine the BRDF effect or how an
object will reflect or refract light based
| | 02:52 | upon its angle to the viewer.
| | 02:55 | If I turn that off, then I have the ability
then to adjust this manually.
| | 03:01 | Store that image, and just to play
around with this a little bit I'll set the
| | 03:05 | 0 Degree Reflection to 0, meaning that
if the surface is pointed towards the
| | 03:10 | camera then it will get no reflections.
| | 03:13 | Do a quick render of that.
| | 03:15 | You can see that that has changed the look considerably.
| | 03:18 | Here is the version with BRDF reflections
and here is the version where I've
| | 03:22 | just set it manually.
| | 03:24 | I could play around with that a bit more
but I think the Fresnel Reflections are
| | 03:28 | easier and probably better,
so I am going to turn that back on.
| | 03:32 | There is one more option I do want to
show to you, which has to do with whether
| | 03:37 | surfaces will reflect on their inside or not.
| | 03:39 | In this case I do want reflections on the inside of the glass.
| | 03:43 | To achieve that effect I want to scroll up,
I'm looking for Advanced
| | 03:47 | Reflection and I want to disable Skip
Reflection On Inside, turn that off and
| | 03:54 | do another rendering. Cool!
| | 03:57 | So that's the effect that we get with
Skip Reflection turned off and we're using
| | 04:02 | just a standard BRDF effect from the Index of Refraction.
| | 04:08 | There is just one little thing that I can
maybe adjust, because this is kind
| | 04:12 | of getting lost here; maybe I'll just knock
the Transparency down just a tiny bit,
| | 04:16 | because glass actually does absorb light slightly.
| | 04:20 | I'll give that a Transparency of 0.98 and re-render.
| | 04:26 | So that's how we can set up mia material x for a glass shader.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Backlighting materials with translucence| 00:00 | Some objects need translucence.
| | 00:03 | A card like this, a little card on the
table here is a thin piece of paper.
| | 00:08 | Light needs to shine through the paper.
| | 00:10 | To achieve that effect we can use the
Translucence Attributes in the Material Shader.
| | 00:16 | I'll start by assigning a new Maya
Lambert material to the card, select the Card
| | 00:21 | and right-click and Assign New Material,
it will be a Lambert.
| | 00:24 | I'll go ahead and rename it in the
Attribute Editor, call it a card_lambert.
| | 00:28 | I have got a bitmap for the color here,
so I want to click to create a New
| | 00:34 | Render Node, it will be a File node
and then browse for that file and it's
| | 00:38 | Reserved.png. We can see it here in
the viewport and it looks good there.
| | 00:44 | If we do a render, however, we won't
see the image, in fact, we won't see the
| | 00:49 | card at all, it will render as perfectly black.
| | 00:52 | The reason this is happening is because
the only light in my scene currently
| | 00:57 | is a directional light that's shining
through the window. It's illuminating
| | 01:02 | the other side of the card just fine,
but we cannot see light shining through
| | 01:06 | the card, until we enable translucence.
| | 01:10 | So there it is with no translucence,
I'll go ahead and store that image.
| | 01:15 | I want to go back to the material, so
I'll select my object, go back to that
| | 01:19 | card_lambert. You'll see Translucence here
in this section, and there are three Attributes:
| | 01:26 | Translucence, Depth and Focus.
| | 01:30 | Translucence is the overall amount of translucence,
how much light is able to come through.
| | 01:35 | Depth is how far that light is able to travel,
and Focus has to do with
| | 01:42 | where that the light is directly behind
the translucence material or translucence object.
| | 01:49 | I'm going to just increase the overall
translucence, I'll crank it all the way
| | 01:53 | up to value of 1. Currently we don't
see any change here in our sample.
| | 01:59 | If I play around some of these other attributes,
we'll see things start to change a little bit.
| | 02:07 | So I want a really high translucence depth.
I just want to make sure that the
| | 02:11 | light is able to penetrate completely through the card.
| | 02:15 | This is currently in Maya Scene Units,
which are centimeters in this scene.
| | 02:19 | That means light able to
travel 5 centimeters through.
| | 02:23 | The Focus here, I want to set
that to actually a really low value.
| | 02:27 | If we have a high focus, then the light
source has to be directly behind the object.
| | 02:31 | If it has a low focus, then it basically
diffuses light all through, regardless
| | 02:37 | of the position of the light relative to the object.
| | 02:40 | So if we render this now, we should
start to see some translucence.
| | 02:43 | Yes, we can see it in the front of the card now. Cool!
| | 02:48 | You will notice however that it looks kind of overly bright.
| | 02:52 | It's kind of blasting out a little bit.
| | 02:54 | This side of the card here is actually overexposed.
| | 02:57 | The tabletop next to it is actually an
ideal diffuse material, which means that
| | 03:03 | it's reflecting 100% of the light back.
This one is actually greater than 1,
| | 03:09 | or it has a brightness value that's greater than 1 currently.
| | 03:14 | In order to get a more realistic effect,
what we need do is balance the Diffuse
| | 03:19 | Amount with the Translucence Amount.
| | 03:22 | The two of these should add up to approximately 1.
Let's try a Translucence of .8 and
| | 03:28 | a very low Diffuse amount of let's say .2,
and do another render of that.
| | 03:38 | Let's store this version and then
do one more render, and now we've
| | 03:42 | corrected the backside here. It's
not overexposed any longer and it's
| | 03:48 | rendering as the same color as the
ideal diffuse material behind it, but I'm
| | 03:53 | going to cheat it just a little bit.
| | 03:55 | I want to have little bit brighter
color on the backside of that card.
| | 03:59 | So we'll let this render finish and
then store it, and I'll just play with the
| | 04:05 | values a little bit, I think I want a
little bit more Diffuse, maybe value of .3
| | 04:12 | and one more render.
| | 04:14 | That's the process for creating Translucence Effects
with a Maya Shader.
| | 04:20 | Translucence exists also in the blinn and
other shaders, not just in the Lambert material.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Mapping translucence| 00:00 | We can get much better results from translucence
if we simply map the translucence channel.
| | 00:06 | This rendering you see on the screen here
has no mapping to the translucence.
| | 00:10 | So it's equally translucent across the entire surface.
| | 00:13 | Just adding a map, it's really going to make a big
difference to improving the quality of this look.
| | 00:18 | I want to go ahead and select the card
in the viewport and open up the Attribute
| | 00:23 | Editor, Ctrl+A and go that material
and you'll see Translucence here.
| | 00:27 | I want to place a map into that
translucence channel. I'll click to add a Render
| | 00:32 | Node, and I'll just use the 2D Noise
Texture, 2D Textures>Noise and there's the
| | 00:40 | noise, which is default parameters.
| | 00:43 | Let's see what that looks like if we render it.
| | 00:45 | I have a feeling it's not going to look so good.
We'll need to play around a bit
| | 00:50 | with those noise attributes and get that looking better.
| | 00:53 | But this is just the default result by
just plugging noise into the translucence.
| | 01:00 | That's the result we see from just default noise.
Let's play around with some of these parameters.
| | 01:05 | The first thing I want to do is change
the type of noise. Scroll down, you'll
| | 01:09 | see Noise Type and there are several to
choose from, the one I'm going to use is
| | 01:14 | Perlin Noise, because that's going to
work best for this sort of vellum look I
| | 01:18 | want to achieve here.
| | 01:19 | The other thing I want to do is turn
on this switch that says Inflection.
| | 01:24 | You can see in the Sample slot what it's doing here.
| | 01:26 | It's this kind of amplifying the noise.
| | 01:29 | Now what I want is a kind of low contrast noise.
| | 01:32 | I wanted to have a very high black point.
| | 01:35 | In other words, I don't want any pixel
in the noise to be very dark.
| | 01:39 | To achieve that I'll increase the Threshold here,
that's the black point or the brightness.
| | 01:43 | I'll set it to let's say about .64 or something like that.
| | 01:48 | Now as you see as I've done that,
it's kind of over exposed the materials.
| | 01:52 | It's kind of clipping, we're losing information
in the brightest parts of the texture.
| | 01:58 | To get that information back, I'll reduce the
amplitude and that's the white point or the contrast.
| | 02:04 | I want a really high Threshold and a
low Amplitude in this case; maybe I'll
| | 02:08 | give it an Amplitude of .2. I want a
little bit more detail on this material as well.
| | 02:15 | This Noise Texture, really, it's going to look
better if I increase this Depth Max a couple times.
| | 02:20 | What Depth Max does is it reiterates the noise.
| | 02:25 | You're getting waves of noise inside of waves.
The higher the Depth Max, the more detail you'll get.
| | 02:32 | Then finally, I just wanted to play around
with the frequency here.
| | 02:36 | That's just the overall size of the noise.
It's got a frequency of 8.
| | 02:40 | That's going to be a fairly high frequency
noise or noise that's going to be pretty small.
| | 02:45 | I want to just reduce the frequency, or increase
the wavelength is another way of saying it.
| | 02:50 | I think that's going to look pretty good now, actually.
| | 02:53 | That's the sort of look that
I'm trying to achieve with this.
| | 02:57 | let's do another rendering.
| | 03:03 | That's the result after we've added the
noise to map the translucence. We store
| | 03:09 | that image and we can compare it to
the non-mapped version, if I pull back my
| | 03:14 | slider here at the bottom of the render view.
| | 03:17 | That's the mapped version and the
unmapped version. You can see the mapped
| | 03:21 | version looks a lot better and it not
only has a texture to it, not only does it
| | 03:26 | have a feeling that it's actually made
of some sort of vellum or an interesting
| | 03:31 | paper, but it also helps to accentuate
this profile here, because it's not a
| | 03:36 | uniform color across that line.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Rendering skin with subsurface scattering| 00:00 | To get good results for human skin,
we'll need to simulate a phenomenon known
| | 00:05 | as Subsurface Scattering.
| | 00:08 | That's when light enters an object and
bounces around inside the object and sort
| | 00:13 | of illuminates it from within
before exiting in a diffused fashion.
| | 00:18 | That's what we see here in this final rendering.
The character's ear is showing
| | 00:23 | as kind of red because there's a
light shining behind the character's face.
| | 00:27 | So let's reproduce this.
| | 00:29 | Minimize that view. You can see
I have got lights in the viewport here.
| | 00:34 | I just want to hide those. I will go to
the Show menu and just disable the display
| | 00:39 | of Lights so that won't distract us.
| | 00:40 | I will assign a material to the
character's head, select that Mesh and
| | 00:45 | right-click and choose Assign New Material.
It's a mental ray Material.
| | 00:51 | You will see that there are bunch of
variations on subsurface scattering and they
| | 00:56 | all have sss in their name.
| | 00:58 | The one that we want today is misss_fast_skin_maya.
| | 01:03 | I will click on that and I get an auxiliary dialog here.
| | 01:07 | I will get this little dialog popping up that asks me
Should I use the selected Lightmap.
| | 01:11 | A Lightmap is a node that's required
for the subsurface scattering to work.
| | 01:18 | We really don't need to see this dialog,
but it's here anyway. We can either
| | 01:22 | close the dialog or we can click Use selected.
| | 01:26 | If we created the shader from within
Hypershade, we wouldn't see this dialog.
| | 01:30 | We won't really be able to see the
subsurface scattering effect in the viewports.
| | 01:34 | We will have to do a rendering in order to see that look.
| | 01:37 | I will go ahead and do a quick rendering of this viewport.
| | 01:41 | Now this is the result we got with
just the default skin shader applied.
| | 01:49 | Let me store that so we can compare it later.
| | 01:52 | Here is the final version I came up with.
Here is what we get when we first
| | 01:57 | add the shader; so there is quite a
dramatic difference between those two.
| | 02:00 | So let's play around with the shader attributes.
I want to go into that shading
| | 02:06 | node and let's look at some of these properties here.
| | 02:09 | The Ambient color, I am going to leave it black.
| | 02:12 | The Overall Color is the sort of complexion
of your character. For a fair skinned character,
| | 02:17 | we will leave the overall color at white.
| | 02:20 | What Overall color does is it multiplies
all of the other values below it.
| | 02:26 | If it has a value of white, then it's not
going to dim down any of these others.
| | 02:31 | But if your character has a dark complexion,
you can just reduce the Overall Color.
| | 02:35 | The Diffuse Color is the color that's reflected
back from the extreme outer layer of the skin.
| | 02:40 | I am just going to change that up to a
sort of peach or Caucasian skin color.
| | 02:46 | I am going to increase the Diffuse Weight
just slightly, that way it'll be a little bit less waxy.
| | 02:53 | I've adjusted all these values previously
in my preparation for this course.
| | 02:59 | I am just going to go through and change
a whole bunch of values and explain them as I go.
| | 03:05 | In your own scenes you are going to need
to tune the values to the scale and the
| | 03:10 | lighting conditions of your particular scene.
| | 03:13 | In the Subsurface Scattering layer here
you'll see that there are three color slots
| | 03:17 | and there are numerous attributes below those.
| | 03:21 | These have to do with three different properties of skin.
| | 03:24 | You've got the Epidermal layer, which
is the layered just below the skin.
| | 03:30 | Then you got the Subdermal layer, which is
layer below that, that's sort of between
| | 03:34 | the skin and muscle. Finally, you've got a
backscatter section, and this
| | 03:38 | has to do with light that's shining behind
the subsurface scattering object.
| | 03:44 | That's the sort of translucency effect.
| | 03:47 | The Epidermal Scatter Color, I am going
to leave that where it is at a sort of peachish,
| | 03:52 | but I just want to play around with
some of these values; maybe
| | 03:56 | reduce the Weight of the Epidermal layer.
| | 03:59 | Each layer has a weight factor and
they all add together. I am going to
| | 04:05 | set that Epidermal Scatter Weight to 0.300.,
Then we'll go down to the Scatter Radius.
| | 04:12 | This is the distance that the light
is able to move through the objects.
| | 04:18 | So I will set that value down to let's say 5 cm.
| | 04:23 | Subdermal Scatter Color, I think I want
to change that to a slightly pink color.
| | 04:29 | Then play around with the weight
here as well. Let me reduce the Weight of
| | 04:33 | the Subdermal Scatter Component and
most importantly, the Scatter Radius.
| | 04:39 | The Scatter Radius here is what's
causing the object to look really small,
| | 04:44 | because the light is able to scatter inside
the object too much, too great of a distance.
| | 04:50 | Let me set that down to a value of 8.
| | 04:53 | Then we have the Back Scatter Section,
which is the translucence.
| | 04:56 | I am going to, once again,
play around with the values here.
| | 04:59 | I am going to leave the Weight at 0.500, but I will
set the Back Scatter Radius and Depth to 8.000.
| | 05:07 | Back Scatter Radius is the distance that light
is able to penetrate into the object.
| | 05:11 | Backscatter Depth is the amount that the
light is able to bounce around the inside.
| | 05:20 | So I've adjusted a lot of those attributes.
Let's do a rendering and see what it looks like now.
| | 05:29 | So now this is looking a lot better.
| | 05:31 | We can see that we're getting a little
bit of that red outline there from the
| | 05:35 | light coming behind the character.
We can maybe play around with some of
| | 05:40 | these,kind of maybe improve it a bit,
maybe increase the Backscatter Weight.
| | 05:47 | I will just do a Region Render here.
| | 05:49 | By the way, Interactive Production Render
does not work with Subsurface
| | 05:52 | Scattering because of the Lightmap.
| | 05:54 | We can only do region renders.
| | 05:56 | So I have increased the Backscatter Weight
and that's increased the amount of Translucence.
| | 06:03 | Then we've got the Specularity, and this particular
shader actually has two levels of specularity.
| | 06:11 | The Primary Specularity is for the sort
of overall specular highlights.
| | 06:17 | The secondary specular level is for a
second level of specularity that has to do
| | 06:23 | with maybe the oil or the shininess on the skin.
| | 06:27 | Again, I've already adjusted these in my own scene
and I have written down all the values.
| | 06:31 | I am just going to plug those in here.
| | 06:34 | For the Primary Specular Color,
I don't really want this blue.
| | 06:36 | I prefer it to be just a neutral white.
| | 06:38 | The Primary Weight here, I am going
to leave that to add 0.300.
| | 06:45 | The Edge Weight here, I will leave at 0.800
and that has to do with how bright the edges will be.
| | 06:50 | The Primary Shininess, I will also just leave
at the default of 0.500.
| | 06:55 | But the Secondary Color is one that's
of more interest to me and the one that
| | 07:00 | I will need to play around with.
| | 07:01 | Maybe I will change the Secondary Specular
Color to white again and then play
| | 07:05 | around with the Weight here.
| | 07:07 | I will give it a Secondary Edge Weight
of 0.400 and a Secondary Shininess of 50.
| | 07:14 | I want to really increase that a lot to
put some gloss on the character's skin,
| | 07:20 | and I will do another rendering of that.
| | 07:26 | That's the result that we're getting now.
| | 07:28 | We can maybe make this a little bit
better by perhaps increasing the Secondary
| | 07:32 | Weight to let's say 0.400. What that will do,
it will cause these highlights here;
| | 07:38 | they represent the oil on the skin.
| | 07:40 | They will cause those to come out a little
bit more strongly, and do one more render.
| | 07:49 | That's the result that we've achieved from just
a few minutes of playing around with these attributes.
| | 07:53 | Of course, if we wanted a more sophisticated
skin shader, we need to map these Attributes.
| | 07:58 | We would want to map the Diffuse Color
and map the Specular and map all the Attributes really.
| | 08:04 | Well, that's a good introduction to creating
Subsurface Scattering with Maya and
| | 08:10 | Mental Ray. That concludes our chapter
on Transparency and Translucence.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
6. Surface ReliefAdding detail with a displacement map| 00:00 | Previously in this course we looked
at Bump Mapping, which is a way of
| | 00:04 | simulating surface detail on an object.
| | 00:07 | However, Bump Mapping doesn't actually
change the shape of the object, and if
| | 00:10 | you look at its profile, it won't be changed.
| | 00:13 | If you want the object actually be deviated,
to actually change the shape of it,
| | 00:18 | then you can use a Displacement Map to do that.
| | 00:21 | Displacement Maps work with NURBS surfaces.
That's what we have here on the
| | 00:27 | ground plane outside the window,
that's a NURBS object. I want to Assign a New
| | 00:32 | Material to that to begin.
| | 00:33 | I'll right-click and choose Assign New Material.
It will just be a standard Lambert material.
| | 00:39 | I just want to increase the brightness of it a bit,
| | 00:42 | and change its name. I'll called it ground_lambert.
| | 00:46 | If you look through the Material Node Attributes,
you will not see a Displacement Map channel.
| | 00:51 | In Maya, Displacement Mapping is dealt
with through the shading group.
| | 00:56 | That, of course, is a collection of all the objects
that have that particular material assigned.
| | 01:00 | Here is the shading group now, Lambert4SG.
| | 01:04 | I want to rename that as well, while I am at it.
I will al it ground_lambertSG.
| | 01:09 | Here you'll see a slot for Displacement Material.
I'll go ahead and add a map
| | 01:15 | by clicking on Create Render node. I just
want to use 2D Noise Texture, click on Noise.
| | 01:22 | You'll see that Maya has taken us to a
displacementShader node. There are
| | 01:26 | some attributes in here, but there's
no need for you to change any of this.
| | 01:29 | You might be fooled into thinking that changing the
Scale here will increase the height of
| | 01:33 | the deviation of the displacement, but it doesn't.
| | 01:36 | In order to do that, you need to do that in the texture itself.
| | 01:40 | Let's go to that texture, which is noise1.
I want to have some rolling sort
| | 01:45 | of sand dunes outside the window.
| | 01:47 | To achieve that I want to use a different type of Noise.
Instead of Bilow, I am going to choose Perlin Noise.
| | 01:53 | I'll also make some other changes here.
I don't need such a high frequency.
| | 01:58 | I want sort of rolling hills, so I'll reduce
the Frequency, increasing the wavelength.
| | 02:03 | We've got a few Attribute set here.
We'll go ahead and try to render this now.
| | 02:09 | It does have a displacementShader
attached to it, but we won't see any
| | 02:13 | Displacement out the window just yet.
| | 02:16 | The reason is the Amplitude, or the
height of the Displacement, is so small
| | 02:20 | compared to the size of the object.
| | 02:22 | Before we start playing around with
the Amplitude, or the Height of that
| | 02:27 | Displacement, we will need to go and
do a performance optimization, which is
| | 02:33 | called Calculate Bounding Box.
That is found in the NURBS shape node.
| | 02:37 | I'll need to select that NURBS object
and go to its Shape node. There is a
| | 02:42 | section that says Displacement Map.
I just I want to click the button here
| | 02:46 | that says Calculate Bounding Box Scale.
That just optimizes performance to
| | 02:52 | make sure that we don't have a
lot of unnecessary memory usage.
| | 02:56 | Once that's been done, then I can go
back to the Displacement Texture and
| | 03:01 | increase the Amount of Displacement.
| | 03:03 | To get back to there, I'll choose the
ground_lambert tab and I want to go to
| | 03:09 | its output node, which is the shadinggroup.
From there I can get to the Noise Texture.
| | 03:16 | I want to scroll down, what I am
looking for is the Color Balance section.
| | 03:21 | This is actually how you change the
Height of your Displacement by increasing
| | 03:25 | this Alpha Gain Attribute, that's the strength of the Alpha.
| | 03:29 | The texture here is actually putting out an RGB color
and it's also putting out an Alpha.
| | 03:36 | It is the Alpha that is connected to the Displacement.
| | 03:41 | If I want a greater amount of Displacement,
I'll need to increase the Alpha Gain.
| | 03:45 | I've experimented with this previously,
and because of the size of my object,
| | 03:50 | I need to have a very, very high Alpha Gain
on the order of a 1000 or 2000.
| | 03:54 | I am going to set that to 1500 and do another rendering.
| | 04:01 | We've got some Displacement out that window.
| | 04:03 | Next, we'll actually likely play around
with increasing the quality and basically
| | 04:07 | optimizing performance for rendering.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Controlling displacement tessellation| 00:00 | We've added a Displacement Map to deviate
the shape of the ground plane outside our window.
| | 00:07 | What we want to do here is just optimize
performance. We want achieve the result of
| | 00:11 | we have a highly detailed surface,
but we only want that to be just
| | 00:17 | detailed enough and no more.
| | 00:20 | We control the quality of the Displacement
through the NURBS Tessellation Attributes.
| | 00:26 | Basically there are two things involved in here.
First of all, there's the amount of
| | 00:29 | Tessellation for the NURBS surface.
| | 00:32 | Tessellation of course is tiling or
splitting the object up into polygons.
| | 00:38 | I have a very high tessellation here
for the object itself.
| | 00:44 | Additionally, we've got tessellation
for the displacement. This is another
| | 00:50 | level of Tessellation that happens after
the Displacement Map has been applied.
| | 00:54 | You'll see Initial Sample Rate and Extra Sample Rate.
| | 00:58 | Initial Sample Rate is how many times
a polygon is subdivided as it's being displaced.
| | 01:04 | Then the Extra Sample Rate is an
additional level of subdivision
| | 01:10 | that's applied in order to
enhance sharp edges and features.
| | 01:15 | I am going to turn these down, so we can actually
see the result of a very low quality Displacement.
| | 01:23 | We'll do a Region Render. You can
see that looks kind of chunky, and kind of
| | 01:29 | blocky, as opposed to the original
rendering, which is nice and smooth.
| | 01:34 | So that's a low definition or low level of detail displacement.
| | 01:39 | I can increase that back up.
| | 01:41 | Again, you want to increase this just enough
and no more, until it looks good.
| | 01:46 | I've experimented with this previously
and I found that value of 10 or so
| | 01:51 | for the Initial Sample Rate was fine, and
leave the Extra Sample Rate at a value of 5.
| | 01:56 | Do another region render.
| | 01:58 | That looks good.
| | 02:00 | It should clear up any little jaggies
and weird artifacts you might see in
| | 02:05 | your Displacement Map.
| | 02:06 | I've chosen a very sort of rolling
texture that doesn't have a lot of high
| | 02:12 | contrast, a lot of change between adjacent
pixels, and that works well with this Displacement.
| | 02:18 | If you've got a Displacement Map
that's got very large height or elevation
| | 02:23 | changes or High Contrast Texture, you'll
find that you'll have to increase these
| | 02:28 | values up immensely.
That will increase your Render Times a lot.
| | 02:34 | However, once you get the result that you want,
you can convert the object to polygons.
| | 02:37 | Then you will not have to keep calculating
that on every frame of your rendering.
| | 02:42 | We'll look at that in a later movie.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Working with Use Min Screen for camera-based displacement| 00:00 | I want to share with you a really cool
technique that you can use to optimize
| | 00:04 | performance for NURBS surfaces, so that
the object will only be tessellated in areas
| | 00:09 | that are visible to the current camera.
| | 00:12 | That way you can have a much higher
Tessellation Rate, because you'll only see
| | 00:17 | subdivided polygons in the area that's relevant,
because it's the area that's within the camera view.
| | 00:24 | So to make that happen, I want to select
my NURBS surface and go into its shape node.
| | 00:30 | To make this a really dramatic illustration,
I am going to knock the
| | 00:35 | Feature Displacement values
down to 0 and do a Rendering.
| | 00:41 | So now I have got a really blocky landscape
out there. Let me store that image.
| | 00:48 | To get camera-based Tessellation, all I need to do
is turn on the switch that says Use Min Screen.
| | 00:56 | However, I want to warn you that it is
very important that you have the correct
| | 01:01 | camera view activated when you click
this button, because Use Min Screen can
| | 01:06 | only work from the point of view of one camera.
| | 01:09 | If you have, for example, the top
panel selected, you will not get any
| | 01:13 | benefit from Use Min Screen. You need to
have the actual camera viewport active.
| | 01:19 | So I am going to turn it on and you
can see we are getting subdivisions now,
| | 01:24 | let's do a render of that.
| | 01:29 | Okay. That's not so bad.
| | 01:30 | Let's do a comparison.
| | 01:33 | There it is with Use Min Screen Off
and use Min Screen On.
| | 01:39 | Let me store that, I can reduce the Min Screen Value
for Higher Tessellation or Smaller Triangles.
| | 01:48 | This Min Screen value is a percentage
of screen width, and this is saying
| | 01:52 | basically that a polygon is allowed to
be up to 14% of the width of the screen.
| | 01:58 | Therefore, lower values will give me
smaller triangles or better detail.
| | 02:04 | I'll set that down to a value of 2%
and do another rendering.
| | 02:09 | Now that was pretty fast too, it doesn't take long.
| | 02:13 | We don't see a huge difference here between 14 and 2,
but there was a slight improvement.
| | 02:20 | One last thing I like to just show to you
what that looks like from the top view.
| | 02:23 | I'll tap the spacebar and I need to be
in a shaded view in order to see that.
| | 02:28 | So I'll press the 5 key, and look at this,
you can see the Tessellation, based
| | 02:34 | upon the camera position, my camera
is faced basically in that direction.
| | 02:39 | Therefore, these areas are not being tessellated,
because the camera can't see them.
| | 02:43 | These areas are being tessellated,
because they're within the
| | 02:47 | Field of View of the camera.
| | 02:50 | So that's how you can control camera-based
displacement and camera-based
| | 02:56 | NURBS Tessellation in Maya.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Converting displacement to polygons| 00:00 | One final note on displacement, you can
convert Displacement to Polygons
| | 00:06 | and bake in the Displacement.
That's a good idea if you have got a really
| | 00:11 | complex Displacement, so that you'll
not have to keep calculating that same
| | 00:14 | Displacement on each frame of a
Batch Render for an animation.
| | 00:19 | You'll save a lot of CPU cycles by doing this.
| | 00:22 | Also, once your object is a polygon,
you can do all sorts of things to it, like
| | 00:26 | map it UVs or sculpt it with
a Sculpt Geometry tool and so on.
| | 00:31 | I have got a displaced ground plane here.
If I want to just turn it into
| | 00:36 | a polygon object, it's very simple.
I'll just select it, and go up to the
| | 00:40 | Modify menu and choose Convert>
Displacement to Polygons. It might take a
| | 00:47 | moment to calculate that.
| | 00:48 | Don't panic if it appears that Maya
has hung, it's really just thinking.
| | 00:54 | Once I've done that, if I go to an Ortho View,
we can see that in fact I do have
| | 01:00 | a Displaced Surface, there are my polygons.
| | 01:04 | I want to just hide the original NURBS plane.
It's still sitting in here and I've got it on a layer.
| | 01:10 | So I want to go in here and hide ground
plane layer, so we can see the polygons here.
| | 01:20 | We can render that as is, however,
what I've done is, I've actually
| | 01:24 | blocked these lights from illuminating everything.
| | 01:27 | So in order to render that I would actually
need to go into a window here.
| | 01:33 | I want to go into Window>Relationship
Editor>Light Linking>Light Centric.
| | 01:39 | I'd set this up so there were two separate
lighting setups, one for indoor and
| | 01:43 | one for outdoor. These two
directional light and point light are not
| | 01:48 | shinning on anything, except for the ground plane NURBS.
| | 01:51 | I want to scroll down and find
groundplane_NURBS_displace and just activate that,
| | 01:56 | so that the light will be a shine
on this new polygon landscape.
| | 02:00 | When I render that, there you go,
we've converted Displacement to Polygons.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Normal mapping| 00:00 | Normal mapping is a variation on
bump mapping that gives better quality,
| | 00:05 | especially for real-time games and simulations.
| | 00:08 | Normal map is able to record the deviation
of the surface in three dimensions in X, Y and Z.
| | 00:15 | The red, green and blue channels
of an RGB map correspond to the
| | 00:19 | X, Y and Z directions of a deviated surface normal.
| | 00:25 | Let's add a normal map to the back wall of our scene.
| | 00:28 | I'll select that wall and then right-click
and choose Assign New Material.
| | 00:33 | It'll be a standard Lambert shader.
I'll increase the brightness and rename it.
| | 00:38 | I'll call it normal_map_lambert, and I'll go
to add the Bump Map in a usual way,
| | 00:46 | by clicking on a Create Render Node
button and it will be a File map.
| | 00:49 | But before I go to browse to find that file,
I want to go to this Use As attribute
| | 00:56 | and set that to Tangent Space Normals.
That means the normal map will
| | 01:01 | be operating in this space of the surface itself.
Then I'll go to the File node
| | 01:07 | and browse to find that file.
Here it is, masonry_normal_map.png.
| | 01:13 | While we're looking at the normal map preview,
I just want to point out this
| | 01:18 | is very characteristic of a normal map.
You can see these interesting colors here,
| | 01:22 | the cyan, purple, pink colors. Those correspond
to the direction of the surface at that point.
| | 01:30 | I'll go ahead and click Open.
Although the normal map is actually applied
| | 01:35 | onto my wall here, we won't be able
to see that until we turn on texturing,
| | 01:42 | lighting, and also we need to go into
a higher shading mode in the viewport.
| | 01:47 | I'll press the 6 key to see textures.
I'll press the 7 key to see lighting.
| | 01:52 | I'll need to go up to the Renderer menu
and choose Viewport 2.0.
| | 01:58 | There you go, we got our normal map there,
just as if we would see in a
| | 02:03 | real-time game engine, pretty cool!
| | 02:05 | Now that's actually responding to
light in a really realistic manner.
| | 02:09 | All I really want to do here to
sort of clean this up, is go into the File
| | 02:15 | nodes input node, and go to place2dTexture
and just increase the number of
| | 02:20 | repeats across the surface. Very cool!
| | 02:25 | So we got our normal map in there and
it's working fine in Viewport 2.0.
| | 02:30 | We could render this in mental ray, or we
could render it with the hardware 2.0 renderer.
| | 02:35 | However, the Maya software renderer
doesn't support normal maps, so I try to
| | 02:40 | render this in Maya Software,
it's going to look very strange.
| | 02:43 | Well, let's set it to Maya Hardware 2.0
and do a render of that, and it really
| | 02:48 | looks just like what we see in the viewport here.
| | 02:51 | Likewise, mental ray does support normal maps,
so if I render in mental ray,
| | 02:57 | it takes a little bit longer, of course,
because mental ray is calculating a whole
| | 03:00 | bunch of shadows and stuff, but there we go,
we've got our normal map, just fine
| | 03:04 | there in mental ray.
| | 03:05 | If you want to create your own normal maps,
there are a couple different ways of doing it.
| | 03:09 | The way I did this one was to create a
black-and-white image in Photoshop and
| | 03:15 | then apply the NVIDIA plug-in, NVIDIA
has developer tools to create normal maps.
| | 03:21 | That's a free download, you can go and grab that to convert
| | 03:24 | a black-and-white image into a normal map,
where the black parts of the image are
| | 03:29 | recessed and the white parts of the image standout.
| | 03:33 | Another way to create normal maps is by
taking the surface of the highly
| | 03:38 | detailed object and mapping that as a
normal map onto a lower level of detail object.
| | 03:44 | We'll do that in the next movie.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Generating a normal map with Transfer Maps| 00:00 | The classic application of normal maps
is to sample the normals of a high level
| | 00:06 | of detail object and then project those
on to a much lower level of detail model.
| | 00:11 | The reason you do that is to save polygons.
| | 00:15 | Using a normal map you can substitute a
high level of detail object for one that
| | 00:19 | is much, much lower level of detail.
By much lower I mean, you can reduce
| | 00:24 | the poly count by 95% or more.
With the normal map, you won't be able to tell
| | 00:30 | the difference between the high LOD
and the low LOD object.
| | 00:35 | So it's a very, very powerful and essential
tool for game developers and anyone
| | 00:38 | working in real-time rendering engines.
| | 00:41 | In order to really see the dramatic difference
in polygon counts, I'm going to
| | 00:46 | turn on poly count in the heads up display.
I'll go up here to Display and
| | 00:51 | choose Heads Up Display>Poly Count.
In the poly count columns on the far left,
| | 00:57 | this is the total number of components
for the entire scene.
| | 01:02 | It says here I have got 31480 triangles total
in my scene, but you know what, that's
| | 01:08 | almost all on the high LOD rock I've made.
| | 01:12 | If I select that rock you'll see in the
second column of the poly count readout,
| | 01:17 | it says, I've got 30720 triangles on
that one object. Let's look at
| | 01:24 | the low LOD object that I made.
| | 01:26 | I'll hide this high level of detail one.
I have got on its own layer.
| | 01:31 | Unhide a low LOD object and select it
and you'll see it's only got 760 triangles total.
| | 01:37 | The difference is very striking.
The high LOD has 30000 triangles
| | 01:42 | and the low LOD has less than 1000 triangles.
| | 01:47 | So we're going to use Maya's Transfer
Maps Utility to project the normals from
| | 01:52 | the high LOD onto the low LOD.
| | 01:56 | If I have a low LOD object selected first,
then that will be automatically
| | 02:00 | plugged into the Transfer Maps Utility.
| | 02:02 | It'll be found in the Rendering menu sets.
You'll need to choose Rendering and
| | 02:08 | then go to Lighting/Shading and
activate the Transfer Maps utility.
| | 02:14 | As I said, since I had the low LOD object selected,
it automatically gets placed into
| | 02:18 | this Target Mesh's section.
| | 02:21 | If it weren't, you can just select it and
then click this button to say Add Selected.
| | 02:25 | We also need to select the Source Mesh or Meshes.
| | 02:28 | Those are the ones with the high LODs.
I'll open this up and it says all other
| | 02:33 | meshes here, and that would actually
work in this case, or I can just choose high
| | 02:37 | LOD and then click Add Selected.
| | 02:41 | Moving down a little bit, we've got
the type of maps we want to create. \
| | 02:46 | You'll see Normal map is listed here
already, and if it's not, you can just
| | 02:50 | click the button that says normal on it.
| | 02:53 | I want to change the destination and
the file name here, it's going to actually
| | 02:57 | save into the images folder, but
that's not really my preferred location,
| | 03:02 | because images are for rendered output.
This is actually going to be a
| | 03:06 | Source Image in my final rendering here.
| | 03:10 | So I'm going to go ahead and click on
the File browser, and I want to actually
| | 03:15 | browse to go up a level. I want to
save this into the sourceimages folder,
| | 03:20 | because it's actually going to be a texture.
I'll go ahead and choose the
| | 03:24 | file format which is going to be a PNG.
I can give it a name here as well
| | 03:30 | while I am at it, I'll call
it rock_normal_map and click Save.
| | 03:36 | Now all that has been plugged in here,
sourceimages/rock_normal_map.png, and
| | 03:42 | it's got the file format there as well.
| | 03:44 | It is important that the map space be tangent space,
which is the space of the surface itself.
| | 03:51 | Scrolling down a little bit, you'll see
it says Connect Output Maps.
| | 03:56 | This is Connect maps to shader is enabled,
and New shader is also enabled.
| | 04:01 | What that means is it's going to create
a new material and automatically connect
| | 04:06 | the new normal map to that material.
| | 04:10 | I want to open up the Maya Common Output
and I want to play with the map
| | 04:15 | width and height; the default is actually
only 256, so I want to increase that up to 1024.
| | 04:22 | By the way, for games and rendering
engines in real time, basically you always
| | 04:29 | have to have textures that have resolutions
of powers of two. By that I mean
| | 04:34 | 256, 512, 1024 or 2048. That's
just the way that the hardware works.
| | 04:41 | The GPU expects to see a file
that is a power of two resolution.
| | 04:47 | So I've played with all those options
and got that ready to go and all I need to
| | 04:51 | do now is click Bake and Close.
Wait for a moment while it samples those
| | 04:55 | 30,000 triangles and projects them on
to the normal map for the other object.
| | 05:00 | So I'll select that rock_low LOD and
move it out of the way. You can see
| | 05:06 | it looks pretty good. If I want it
to look almost exactly like the other one,
| | 05:11 | all I really need to do is go into the
Attribute Editor and brighten it up a little bit.
| | 05:20 | Wow! Now, how cool is that?
| | 05:23 | We've got almost identical rendering here and
this rock has 98% fewer triangles than this other rock.
| | 05:33 | If you look closely, that doesn't look perfect.
There are some artifacts.
| | 05:37 | It's a little bit soft, but if I'd saved
out to a higher resolution texture,
| | 05:41 | we would be hard pressed to tell the difference
between the high LOD object and the low LOD object.
| | 05:47 | This one of course, is the one
that we'd actually put in our game.
| | 05:50 | Well, that's all about projecting normal maps.
That concludes our chapter on
| | 05:56 | Surface Relief, Displacement and Normal Maps.
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|
|
7. Adjusting and Combining TexturesFiltering a file texture| 00:00 | One of the most basic properties
of a file texture is its filtering.
| | 00:05 | Filtering is basically a method whereby
a texture can be softened or sharpened
| | 00:11 | based upon its distance. What I've
done here to illustrate that point is
| | 00:16 | I've created two versions of a simple
masonry material. On the left, I have got
| | 00:22 | one that's got a file texture that's
only 256 pixels square. On the right,
| | 00:27 | I've got one that's 2048 pixels square or a 2K texture.
| | 00:33 | If we back up a little bit in the view
and do a rendering, we really won't
| | 00:37 | be able to tell the difference between
these two. Ironically, from this
| | 00:41 | distance, the lower resolution texture
actually looks a little bit sharper.
| | 00:46 | Let's get in closer now. When we
get in really close on these, you can see
| | 00:53 | pretty clearly and unmistakably that the
texture on the left looks really fuzzy,
| | 00:57 | and the one on the right looks
considerably sharper. Again, this one has a lot
| | 01:02 | more data, it's a 2K texture.
| | 01:03 | I am going to do an IPR rendering of this,
.so that we can make changes and see
| | 01:08 | those changes update in real time.
| | 01:11 | I'll draw a rectangle around that area
Now I'll go ahead and play around
| | 01:16 | with the filtration modes.
| | 01:18 | If I select the object on the left here,
and drill down into its file texture
| | 01:24 | for its color, we can play around with the Filter Type.
| | 01:28 | The default Filter Type is Quadratic.
As you see, there are bunch of options here.
| | 01:32 | Let's just turn filtration off for a moment.
I'll click Off and you can
| | 01:38 | see now, this is pretty dramatic. We're
actually seeing individual pixels here.
| | 01:43 | In fact let me get an even closer, so
we can see that really, really clearly.
| | 01:48 | Do another IPR. So you can see now that
that texture on the left has got really big
| | 01:56 | pixels there. That's because I turned
filtration Off. Usually it's set to
| | 02:01 | quadratic and that's a general
all-purpose choice. You've got a bunch of
| | 02:06 | other options here, but they look
very similar. Really, the only thing that
| | 02:12 | matters is whether filtration is on or off.
Again, if it's off then we'll
| | 02:16 | actually see the individual pixels here.
| | 02:18 | So you might wonder why you would want
to turn filtration off, because it'll
| | 02:24 | make your pixels really obvious.
| | 02:26 | Well, actually for a high resolution texture,
like the one I have got on the
| | 02:31 | right here, you can improve quality
in some cases by disabling filtration.
| | 02:35 | If I select that other object and
go into its color map and turn its
| | 02:40 | filtration off, it actually got sharper here
and actually looks better.
| | 02:46 | Filtration will soften up your textures.
You do need it to be softened up
| | 02:51 | if you got a low resolution texture,
but with a high resolution texture,
| | 02:56 | it's an option to turn filtration off.
It will improve the quality.
| | 03:01 | If you're actually using a texture as an
image plain or a matte painting, then it
| | 03:07 | actually is a good idea to turn
filtration off, because you don't want that
| | 03:11 | image to get filtered unnecessarily.
Basically, you want it to look exactly
| | 03:15 | the same as the original background image.
| | 03:18 | One more thing to mention here is that
there's an option that says pre-filter.
| | 03:22 | If that's on, then that's basically a blur factor.
| | 03:27 | The limit is only 10 pixels here, so
if I turn that up you'll see that got a
| | 03:31 | little bit blurry, turn it back down to 2.
| | 03:35 | Pre-filtering is most dramatic on low resolution textures.
| | 03:39 | If I select the left-hand object here
with the only 256 pixel texture, and go
| | 03:45 | into its file texture node once again,
you'll see when I turn Pre Filtering on,
| | 03:50 | it really adds a sort of a Gaussian
blur effect. I can turn that up to
| | 03:56 | a radius of 10 pixels and actually completely
blur out my texture. Combine
| | 04:01 | that with quadratic filtering and we've got
a sort of soft blurry effect on the texture.
| | 04:09 | That's how filtering works in Maya for file textures.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adjusting file texture color balance| 00:00 | Maya provides the ability to adjust the
color of a file texture. It's a very
| | 00:05 | useful feature, because we can save time
and disk space by not building multiple
| | 00:11 | versions of a texture in our paint program.
| | 00:14 | We could just make one texture and
then adjust its color directly in Maya.
| | 00:19 | To do that, you will want to get the
Attribute Editor open, go to that file
| | 00:24 | texture node and scroll down.
You're looking for a session that says Color
| | 00:28 | Balance. If you open that up, you'll
see, you've got some color sliders here.
| | 00:33 | Don't be distracted by the first one here,
Default Color. That's actually the
| | 00:38 | color of the texture where it's
not directly tiled across the surface.
| | 00:43 | Sometimes you'll have a texture that
just a decal that appears on a certain area
| | 00:48 | of the object. Anywhere that that non-tiled
decal doesn't appear, we'll see
| | 00:55 | this default color show through.
| | 00:57 | But to change the color of the texture,
what you want to play around with are
| | 01:01 | the Color Gain and Color Offset.
| | 01:04 | Color Gain is the white point and it's
defaulted to white. If I bring this
| | 01:08 | down halfway, you'll see that it's
dimming the level down to 50% gray and
| | 01:13 | then back up again.
| | 01:16 | Color Offset is the black point or the
brightness. When I bring that up, I'm
| | 01:23 | basically biasing up all the black pixels
and pushing them up towards white.
| | 01:28 | We can use this to control brightness and contrast.
| | 01:31 | Gain is essentially the contrast and offset is the brightness.
| | 01:36 | Now here's a really cool trick you
can do that works best with a grayscale
| | 01:41 | texture like the one I have here. You
can go into the Color Gain color swatch
| | 01:47 | and change it up to a different color.
| | 01:49 | This technique does work best with
the texture that is grayscale. If it had
| | 01:54 | color in it then the Color Gain setting
here would mix with that color.
| | 02:00 | So that's a simple technique you can
employ. Maybe I'll reduce the saturation
| | 02:05 | a bit on that.
| | 02:06 | As you can see, it's affecting the
entire texture equally. I don't have the
| | 02:11 | ability to isolate just the bricks
from the grout in this case.
| | 02:14 | If I wanted to do that, I could do that
with a layered texture or through other methods
| | 02:18 | we'll cover elsewhere in this course.
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| Understanding 2D texture placement| 00:00 | The placement of the texture on a polygon
object is determined by two things, the
| | 00:05 | UV's of the object and the attributes
of the material shader nodes.
| | 00:10 | UV's are a property of the model and
they're unique to that object.
| | 00:16 | Of course, if you have two objects with
the same material applied, if you make
| | 00:20 | changes to that materials attributes, it
will affect both of the objects, let's do that.
| | 00:25 | So if I select either one of these,
go to the Attribute Editor, go to
| | 00:29 | that material and drill down into the color,
I can go to the place2dTexture node.
| | 00:36 | Within here, I can control things like
the number of repeats. I have
| | 00:41 | got Repeat U and V, let's set those
both up to a value of 2, and you see as I
| | 00:45 | do that it's affecting both of the objects,
because they both have the same material applied.
| | 00:50 | Likewise, I can do things like turn wrapping off.
You will want to do this
| | 00:55 | sometimes if you've got a decal that
you want to appear just in a certain
| | 00:58 | area of your object.
| | 01:01 | Anywhere that we don't see a texture here,
because the Wrapping has been
| | 01:06 | turned off, the color that we see there
is determined in the file texture nodes
| | 01:11 | color balance settings.
| | 01:13 | If I go to that file texture the default color
here is what we see in the
| | 01:19 | background behind that texture itself.
| | 01:24 | So back to the place2dTexture node,
set it back to where I founded. Wrap U and
| | 01:28 | Wrap V and repeats back to 1. You
can see then, if I make changes to the
| | 01:35 | material, it will affect all of the
objects that have that material applied.
| | 01:39 | If you want to have two dissimilar objects
that have the same material and have
| | 01:45 | the similar texture placement, then the
way you want to do that is by editing the UVs.
| | 01:50 | We could project new UVs onto
one of these objects, but they already
| | 01:57 | have good UVs on them and really
all I want to do is scale the UVs.
| | 02:02 | To do that I'll select the object and go to the
Polygons menu set and go to Edit UVs>UV Texture Editor.
| | 02:11 | Now what you see here is the UV layout,
I have got the image in the background
| | 02:16 | here and we've got the actual UV
information overlaid on top of that.
| | 02:24 | If I want these two objects to have a
similar scale to the texture, what I can do is
| | 02:28 | select the UVs here and scale them.
I can right-click and go into the UV
| | 02:33 | component mode and then just select all
the UVs and you can see as I move them,
| | 02:40 | we're changing the texture placement.
I can also scale, so I can grab the
| | 02:44 | Scale tool over here. If I scale the UVs up,
they will be larger relative to
| | 02:50 | the texture itself, and I can kind of
make those bricks become smaller on the object.
| | 02:55 | If I scale the UVs down, the UV coordinates
are smaller relative to
| | 03:03 | the image and therefore we get
a larger pattern on the object.
| | 03:08 | Now in Maya, technically, you're not
supposed to go beyond this zero to one area here.
| | 03:13 | You can do it. It's just that, if this
becomes too large, then it will look a
| | 03:20 | little bit fuzzy in the viewport.
It'll actually define a new render.
| | 03:25 | I'll just reposition this just to keep it nice
and clean. Basically, that's how UV
| | 03:32 | coordinates work in Maya.
| | 03:34 | The UVs are on a per object basis.
Material properties such as tiling are, of course,
| | 03:40 | on a per shader, per material basis.
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| Assigning materials by face component| 00:00 | There are several ways of combining
more than one material on a single object.
| | 00:04 | The simplest is just to simply assign
a different material based upon a face
| | 00:09 | component selection.
| | 00:11 | For example, if I want to create a
window in this wall, I can just select the
| | 00:16 | faces where I want the new window
material to appear. I'll select the wall and
| | 00:21 | right-click and go into Face component
mode and select some of those polygon
| | 00:25 | faces in the center there. Those
are selected now. I can just go over
| | 00:31 | to those faces and right-click and
choose Assign New Material. That new
| | 00:35 | material will only be assigned to
those faces. Let's give it a Blinn material.
| | 00:40 | I'll just reduce the color and increase
the transparency, so that now I've got a hole.
| | 00:47 | I'll go back to Object mode, where I
Click and choose Object mode and tumble
| | 00:51 | around in the view and you can see that
in fact, there is a new Blinn material there .
| | 00:55 | We're getting a little bit of shiny
highlights there, because I
| | 01:00 | haven't turned the Specularity off. Cool!
| | 01:03 | So that's one way we can assign materials
based upon face selection. We can also
| | 01:09 | do it from the Hyper shade.
| | 01:10 | If I select the object and just
reassign the existing material--I'll just run
| | 01:16 | through the process again. So
reassign the material to the whole object,
| | 01:21 | right-click and go back into Face mode,
select the Faces, then go to hypershade,
| | 01:26 | Window>Rendering Editors>Hypershade.
Wwith those faces selected, I can
| | 01:33 | simply right-click on a material and
choose Assign Material To Selection.
| | 01:38 | Then it accomplishes the exact same thing.
Right-click and go back out to Object
| | 01:42 | mode and tumble around to check
to see if I got what I wanted.
| | 01:45 | That's a very simple way of combining
multiple materials on a single object,
| | 01:51 | just by assigning them by face component selection.
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| Nesting maps| 00:00 | Another way that we can composite
maps is through nesting.
| | 00:05 | We can use a map as a map within
another map. To achieve that, I'm going to
| | 00:11 | go ahead and assign a new material to this plane.
| | 00:14 | Right-click and Assign New Material,
it'll a Lambert and let me call this one,
| | 00:19 | nested_maps_lambert.
| | 00:21 | I want to have two layers here.
| | 00:26 | The top layer is going to be like a poster
that's applied on the wall and then
| | 00:31 | the bottom layer or the back layer
is going to be the masonry texture.
| | 00:35 | I want to put my poster in first.
| | 00:38 | So for the Color map, I'll go ahead
and click to create a Render node.
| | 00:42 | That'll be a File node of course.
| | 00:44 | I will browse for that file and I've got one
here, pointLabos_1594, open that up.
| | 00:53 | I do want to rename this, okay,
| | 00:54 | so that we know which one is which.
I will call this one file_poster.
| | 00:59 | Right now of course, it just covers the
entire area of that object. If I want
| | 01:04 | to just restrict it to a smaller area
then I can go into the place 2dTexture
| | 01:09 | node and play around with some of these attributes.
| | 01:12 | If you want to prevent it from tiling, of course,
you can turn Wrapping off.
| | 01:18 | But I want to mention that if I just
set the Repeats up here to like 2.00
| | 01:23 | and 2.00, we can see the default
color behind that texture and that looks
| | 01:28 | fine in the viewport.
| | 01:29 | But if I actually render it, it'll still tile.
| | 01:33 | That's a bit of a quirk in the software.
| | 01:36 | What I want to do actually is not to
repeat the UVs. I am going to set those
| | 01:40 | back to 1.00 and 1.00.
| | 01:42 | I want to reduce the Coverage area here.
| | 01:45 | I don't want to cover the entire surface.
| | 01:47 | So I will say a Coverage of 0.500 and 0.500.
| | 01:52 | Then I can also shift that by adjusting
the Translate Frame values here.
| | 01:56 | I can give that a value of 0.250, shift
it over to the left, 0.250 to shift it up.
| | 02:03 | Now you can see that the proportion
of this isn't really quite right.
| | 02:06 | It's supposed to be taller, but we're not
going to worry about that right now.
| | 02:10 | So I've got my image applied and I
can see the default color behind it.
| | 02:14 | If I go back to the File node,
you can see the Default Color here.
| | 02:20 | If I play with that, we can see that changing
and if we do a render, it should look the same.
| | 02:25 | Okay, so that's fine.
| | 02:27 | What I want to do to nest the maps
is simply to put a map into this
| | 02:31 | Default Color here.
| | 02:33 | Go ahead and click to create a new
Render node and it's going to be another
| | 02:37 | File node and I'm going to go ahead and browse
for that file and put my masonry image in there.
| | 02:45 | So basically there it is.
| | 02:47 | I've got nested maps and it looks fine in Viewport 2.0.
| | 02:52 | If I go into default quality rendering,
it's going to look pretty fuzzy.
| | 02:56 | High quality is okay as well.
| | 02:58 | These have separate texture placement nodes.
| | 03:02 | So for this one, which is my background,
let me call that one file_masonry,
| | 03:08 | I can go into its 2dtexture Placement
node and change its Repeat so that those
| | 03:13 | bricks will be smaller.
| | 03:14 | Give that Repeat of 3.00 and 3.00.
| | 03:17 | Now I haven't touched the UVs on the object here.
| | 03:20 | I've done all of this through the Texture Placement nodes.
| | 03:25 | When we look at the Hypershade, we
can kind of analyze what's going on here.
| | 03:29 | If I go to Window>Rendering Editors>Hypershade
and graph the network here,
| | 03:36 | right-click and choose Graph Network,
there what you will see is in fact one
| | 03:42 | file is feeding into the other file node.
| | 03:47 | So this one's color is feeding into
the other one's poster default color.
| | 03:53 | So that's going into the default color.
| | 03:56 | That's how you can nest maps in Maya.
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| Compositing maps with a layered texture| 00:00 | Nesting maps is kind of a limited technique.
| | 00:03 | It won't work in all cases.
| | 00:04 | It worked fine in the case of a texture
that just needed to be slapped on top
| | 00:09 | of another texture, and we didn't
care about the edges being transparent
| | 00:14 | or anything like that.
| | 00:15 | So that was fine, but if I want to, for
example, have the effect of graffiti on
| | 00:21 | the wall, then I'll need to use a layered Texture.
| | 00:26 | To start, I'll assign a new material to my plane here.
| | 00:29 | I'll right-click and choose Assign New Material.
| | 00:32 | It'll just be a standard Lambert
material and I'll change its name.
| | 00:36 | I'll call it layered_texture_lambert.
| | 00:42 | Then from here, I'll need to go into the Hypershade.
| | 00:46 | Open up the Hypershade, and I'll graph
the network on this new material I've made.
| | 00:52 | Right-click and graph Network.
| | 00:53 | Now I want to create a layered texture.
| | 00:58 | It's found in the section here that says Other Textures.
| | 01:02 | I'll click to create it.
| | 01:04 | I want to connect that to the Color of this shader.
| | 01:07 | So I'll select that shader and then
middle-mouse, drag the layeredTexture
| | 01:12 | ontothe diffuse color slot.
| | 01:14 | Now that connection has been made.
| | 01:16 | So back to the layeredTexture here.
| | 01:18 | We can put as many as we want in here.
| | 01:20 | We can put up to 10 textures in here.
| | 01:22 | Right now, there's a default one.
| | 01:24 | It's just got a green color that's completely opaque.
| | 01:27 | I need to add a couple of File nodes here now.
| | 01:30 | I will go back over to the Create section here
and I'll create a new 2D File Texture.
| | 01:37 | Click on that, let me cleanup
the Graph by clicking Rearrange.
| | 01:42 | Back out a little bit and now I want to
assign the file to this node here so,
| | 01:49 | I will select that and go the
Attribute Editor and browse for the file.
| | 01:52 | This is going to be the top level here
and that'll be this graffiti image I've created.
| | 01:58 | It's pure white pixels, but it's got transparency.
| | 02:01 | It's a PNG that has alpha in it.
| | 02:04 | Go ahead and click Open.
| | 02:06 | Now I want to just drag that into the layered Texture.
| | 02:09 | So I will select my layered_texture,
select that Texture node and then middle-
| | 02:15 | mouse drag this File node into the layered
Texture and now, I've got a new layer here.
| | 02:21 | Now the green one here is overriding
this new one I've added. The flow here
| | 02:28 | is on the right side is behind and on
the left side is in front in the layers.
| | 02:35 | So I don't need this one, in fact,
I can actually just delete it.
| | 02:38 | So now, we can see that we're actually
getting our little graffiti image.
| | 02:43 | Essentially what's happening here is
that we've got a single layer in our
| | 02:48 | layered Texture. You can see here
that the Color is connected and the
| | 02:52 | Alpha is also connected.
| | 02:54 | If we look in our view now, we're seeing
that wherever the Alpha was opaque,
| | 03:00 | we're seeing the actual texture show through
and wherever the Alpha was transparent,
| | 03:04 | we're seeing black, because there's
nothing behind it currently.
| | 03:10 | So let's put something back there.
I will make another File node and Rearrange
| | 03:14 | the Graph once again.
| | 03:16 | Here's file2 and I'll select that and I'll browse.
| | 03:22 | I want to choose my image, which is just
that masonry_diffuse image. I'll click Open.
| | 03:28 | Now I want to put that into my layered Texture.
| | 03:31 | I'll select the layeredTexture node
and then middle-mouse drag file2 to the
| | 03:35 | right of file1, which is going to be behind it.
And there we go.
| | 03:40 | We've got a layered Texture that was so easy
If I do render here, it looks just the same.
| | 03:46 | We want to control the placement of that
but we'll do that with multiple UV Sets.
| | 03:50 | We'll do that in the next movie.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Applying multiple UV sets| 00:00 | We've got a layered Texture by choosing 2 File nodes.
| | 00:04 | But they're both sharing the same
UV information. That makes it a bit
| | 00:08 | difficult for me to place them independently
of one another on this surface.
| | 00:13 | What we'll do is we'll create a new
UV Set and we'll assign each of those
| | 00:19 | File nodes to a different UV Set and that will
give us the power to control them independently.
| | 00:25 | First thing I want to do is just rename the existing UV Set.
| | 00:28 | I want to select the object and
go to the Polygons menu set and go to
| | 00:34 | Create UVs>Rename Current UV Set.
| | 00:37 | The default name for the original first
UV Set that's always created for a new
| | 00:43 | polygon object, the name is Map1.
| | 00:48 | But really, I want to call it uvSet1,
because that's a lot clearer.
| | 00:53 | We're not dealing with a map per se,
we're dealing with UV Set. So, I just want to
| | 00:57 | rename that for clarity's sake.
| | 01:00 | Now I've got one UV Set and I want to create a new one.
| | 01:04 | Create UVs>Create Empty UV Set>Options
and I want that to be called uvSet2,
| | 01:13 | I go ahead and click Create.
| | 01:15 | Now I've created a new UV Set, but
that doesn't mean that it's active.
| | 01:19 | If I try to project a new UVs, I will
actually be projecting them into uvSet1.
| | 01:25 | That means, I need to now make UV Set to the Active set.
| | 01:29 | I will go up into Create UVs once again
and Set Current UV Set, I want to
| | 01:36 | make sure, it's uvSet2, Set Current.
| | 01:40 | Now the next thing we want to do is
determine which UV Set is connected to
| | 01:46 | which File node and that's done
through a Window called the UV Linker.
| | 01:50 | I want to go into the Window menu here,
under Relationship Editors>UV Linking,
| | 01:58 | and let's do UV-Centric.
| | 02:00 | It doesn't matter which of these two you choose.
| | 02:04 | UV-Centric just places the UVs
on the left side of the dialog here.
| | 02:09 | If I click on uvSet1 over here on the
left, then on the right, you will see that
| | 02:14 | both file_graffiti and file_masonry light up.
| | 02:18 | That means, they're both connected to uvSet1.
| | 02:21 | If I select uvSet2, you'll see that
neither one of those is connected.
| | 02:26 | So what I want to have happened here
is uvSet1 will be associated with the masonry,
| | 02:33 | and uvSet2 will be associated with the graffiti.
That way, since uvSet2 is the currently active UV Set,
| | 02:42 | when I do a new projection, it will work on the graffiti.
| | 02:46 | So uvSet2 is going to be file_graffiti and
when I click there, I just made the connection.
| | 02:52 | Now you see that my image disappeared here.
Don't panic here.
| | 02:56 | That's what we expect to see, because
I've connected the File node to a UV Set
| | 03:02 | that does not currently have any information in it.
| | 03:05 | We will need to add UV information by projecting it.
| | 03:10 | If I go to uvSet1 you'll see that's
connected to masonry and, again,
| | 03:15 | uvSet2 is connected to the graffiti.
| | 03:17 | So uvSet2 is currently the active one.
That means, if I create new UVs,
| | 03:23 | they'll go into set number 2.
| | 03:26 | Backup in the Polygons menu set, in the
Create UVs menu, I want to choose Planar Mapping.
| | 03:31 | It's important to go into the options in this case,
to make sure that we're projecting from the Z axis.
| | 03:36 | The default is actually to project from the X axis,
which is from the side.
| | 03:42 | We need to be projecting from Z. That means it
will project onto the front surface of the plane.
| | 03:48 | Go ahead and click Project and now,
we've got our graffiti back. If we want
| | 03:53 | to place that, all we need to do is play
around with this manipulator.
| | 03:57 | We can scale it in different directions.
| | 03:59 | We could even type in exact values here.
| | 04:02 | I know that my original image had a
2:1 Aspect Ratio, so if I set the Width to
| | 04:07 | 200 and the Height to 100 then I know
that it is going to be the same shape as
| | 04:13 | my original bitmap image. All right!
| | 04:16 | That's pretty cool. I can also rotate.
| | 04:19 | If I just click over here on the corner
of the manipulator, it changes to a
| | 04:24 | different manipulator, which now has
a circle around it. If I drag that circle,
| | 04:28 | I can actually rotate the UV projection.
| | 04:32 | Now you can see, of course, that I'm getting tiling.
| | 04:37 | I can fix that up, too, of course, if I go
back into the Hypershade. I want to
| | 04:44 | graph the network on this shader.
I'm concerned with the place2dTexture node
| | 04:50 | on the file_graffiti.
| | 04:53 | So go over to place2dTexture, hit Ctrl+A
and just simply turn Wrapping off.
| | 05:04 | You can see that is a little bit funny there.
| | 05:06 | The reason of that's happening is because
we've got transparency in this image.
| | 05:11 | To fix that up, I can go into the
Default Colors here, set that to Black and
| | 05:18 | now it's not mixing that color any longer.
| | 05:22 | If we want to go back to changeing the
Placement here, just select the
| | 05:25 | object, go into the Channel box, select
the polyPlanarProjection node and, if you
| | 05:32 | don't already have the Show
Manipulator tool active, you click on that.
| | 05:37 | Now you can interactively place
the texture wherever you want it.
| | 05:43 | We of course could continue that
process as many times as we needed,
| | 05:47 | layering more and more textures and
we would create UV Sets along the way.
| | 05:53 | If I wanted to go back and change the
UVs for the bricks, then what I would do is,
| | 05:59 | I would select the object.
| | 06:00 | Go up to Create UVs and Set Current UV
Set to uvSet1, Set Current. I could
| | 06:11 | for example, project again.
| | 06:13 | I could do another projection.
| | 06:14 | Create UVs>Planar Mapping once again, and now
I'm only controlling the UVs for the bricks.
| | 06:21 | I'll click and go back to Object mode.
| | 06:26 | So that's how we can use UV Sets for multiple textures,
| | 06:30 | especially for a layered Texture. It's very helpful.
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| Compositing shaders| 00:00 | As we've seen, the layered texture node
is extremely useful for superimposing
| | 00:05 | textures on top of one another.
| | 00:07 | But of course that only works within
an individual texture channel.
| | 00:11 | In other words, we can layer multiple
diffuse textures on top of one another
| | 00:16 | or multiple specular maps on top of one
another. But if we wanted to superimpose
| | 00:20 | two completely different shaders on one
another, then we wouldn't be able to use
| | 00:25 | a layered texture node. We need to use
the layered shader node, so let's do that.
| | 00:30 | I'll go ahead and open up the Hypershade
and you will see in here I have got a
| | 00:37 | bunch of materials already built and
most importantly right now I've got
| | 00:40 | GalssGinBottle_blinn, and LabelGinBottle_blinn.
Of course, the label is opaque and the glass is transparent.
| | 00:50 | Let's create a layered shader and that
will be found over here in the Create panel,
| | 00:55 | click on layered Shader and
I have got a layered Shader built.
| | 00:59 | If you don't already have the Attribute Editor open,
you want to hit Ctrl+A and get that visible.
| | 01:04 | I will go over here, type in a new name for this,
I will call it blinn_layeredShader.
| | 01:11 | I just want to refresh this view,
because I was experiencing some display
| | 01:14 | glitches earlier. So I will just
unselect that and reselect that node.
| | 01:18 | So now I want to middle-mouse drag my materials
over here into the layered shader panel.
| | 01:23 | GlassGinBottle_blinn, I will middle-mouse drag that over,
| | 01:29 | and LabelGinBottle_blinn, I will
middle-mouse drag that one over as well.
| | 01:33 | Now you see I have got those three
layers here. Of course, I don't need this
| | 01:37 | green one here that came as the default.
| | 01:39 | So I will just click the X to get rid of that.
| | 01:42 | So now I have got two layers here, but
what I have done here is I have put them
| | 01:47 | in the wrong order. The glass is on
top of the label. I can kind of tell
| | 01:52 | that because my label, the color
has been sort of distorted here.
| | 01:55 | I just need to change the order of these two.
Simply middle-mouse drag and drop
| | 01:59 | to change the order. Now the label
is superimposed on top of the glass.
| | 02:05 | Now before I can render this and get a
good result, there is one more thing I
| | 02:08 | need to do, which is change the compositing flag.
| | 02:12 | This is really important, and unfortunately,
the naming here is not really
| | 02:17 | terribly obvious as to how this works.
| | 02:20 | Layer Shaders is the default behavior.
What that does is it puts the layer
| | 02:27 | Shader into an additive mode. It will
add the colors of all the layers together.
| | 02:33 | That additive mode is useful when
you are creating something like, let's a
| | 02:37 | varnish or a car paint where you have
got maybe multiple layers of specularity
| | 02:43 | and they need to add together.
| | 02:45 | Well that's not what I want in this case.
What I want is just to replace
| | 02:50 | the colors of the underlying layer.
The replacement mode is labeled layer Texture.
| | 02:58 | So I need to be in layer Texture mode.
| | 03:01 | So now I am just going to assign that
layeredShader to my Gin bottle. So I will
| | 03:05 | select the bottle and then right now
just click on the material and choose
| | 03:10 | Assign material to selection.
| | 03:11 | I will go ahead and do a rendering
of that and check our work.
| | 03:18 | Very good, so now we have got a
layered shader working. We got two completely
| | 03:23 | different shaders, one superimposed over the other.
| | 03:26 | I want to store that image, because, in fact,
I have mental ray version of the
| | 03:31 | glass shader that's actually, maybe a
little bit better. It's brighter and it
| | 03:35 | kind of pops on the screen a little bit more.
| | 03:37 | So I want to use that mental ray Mia Material
for the glass, instead of this
| | 03:43 | blinn glass shader I have created. Lets do that.
| | 03:46 | I will go back to the Hypershade and I
will make another layered shader node.
| | 03:53 | Let me rename that one, so I will go
over here and rename it. We will call it
| | 03:58 | mr_layeredShader. I just want to
clear my graph out, just to erase whatever
| | 04:05 | is there and bring these back down in here.
| | 04:08 | mr-layerShader, I want to middle-mouse drag that in.
I will bring my label in.
| | 04:14 | I have got LabelGinBottle_blinn,
I want to middle mouse drag that over.
| | 04:20 | Label is the same and there is
that bug I was talking about earlier,
| | 04:25 | where my Attributor Editor kind of goes away.
I will just click here to refresh the panel.
| | 04:30 | So what I have got in here now?
I have got that default green material that
| | 04:35 | doesn't really need to be there, So I
can kind of axe that out, delete it.
| | 04:39 | I have got my blinn label, and
now here is the tricky part.
| | 04:42 | I want to bring that mental ray Mia Material
glass material that I have made earlier.
| | 04:48 | Here it is, it's called mr-GlassBottle.
| | 04:49 | I want to bring that over to the Back layer
of my layered shader. But if I try to
| | 04:56 | middle-mouse drag over here, nothing happens.
| | 04:59 | So it's kind of debatable whether that's
a bug or a feature. But we can't
| | 05:03 | actually middle-mouse drag a mental
ray material on to a layered shader.
| | 05:10 | However, we can use the mental
ray material within a layered shader;
| | 05:13 | we just have to go through a different
process to make that connection.
| | 05:17 | I want to bring that down into the work
area here, so I will middle-mouse drag
| | 05:21 | that down. What I need to do is I need
to right mouse click on the lower
| | 05:26 | right hand corner of that material.
I want to choose the triple output.
| | 05:32 | So all of the possible outputs from Mia
Material x are listed here. The one
| | 05:37 | that I want is the result. That's the output color.
| | 05:40 | It's not just the reflection,
not just the diffuse, but everything.
| | 05:45 | So I want to choose Triple>result>result.
| | 05:48 | Then over here on my mr_layeredShader,
I want to left click in the lower
| | 05:53 | left hand corner and I want to connect
it to the color, inputs color, and you
| | 05:59 | can see I have got several of them listed here.
| | 06:01 | So I will just choose the one that's not already taken.
| | 06:04 | Now that's connected, and so what I
have got here, is I have got the label
| | 06:08 | on top and I have got the mr_GlasBottle_mia on bottom.
| | 06:13 | Couple of things I need to do here to make this work.
| | 06:16 | I want to select that layer and I want
to reduce this Transparency here.
| | 06:20 | If I didn't reduce that, then it would
render as completely transparent.
| | 06:24 | So we need to bring that all the way down.
Then I also need to change the
| | 06:28 | compositing flag once again to layer Texture.
| | 06:32 | Then I want to assign this new layered shader to the bottle.
| | 06:36 | So select the bottle, right mouse click
and assign material to selection.
| | 06:41 | Go back to our Render View. What we are
looking at here is the version with the
| | 06:45 | blinn glass shade. I will do a new
rendering with the mental ray glass.
| | 06:55 | Now that's finished rendering, and I
have got my mental ray glass, let's see the
| | 06:59 | deference between that and the standard Maya blinn glass.
| | 07:02 | So that's the blinn glass that I made by hand,
and that's a Mia Material x.
| | 07:07 | so you can see that Mia Material x is considerably brighter.
| | 07:10 | So that's how we can layer shaders in Maya,
either with standard Maya materials
| | 07:16 | or with mental ray materials.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Driving ramp UVs with a texture| 00:00 | Maya's procedural textures are very complete.
You've got a lot of choices and you
| | 00:05 | can do incredible work with them.
| | 00:07 | However, you'll notice that a lot of them
only have maybe one or two color slots.
| | 00:11 | You might think that that's going
to limit you to the color choices.
| | 00:16 | But in fact it doesn't, because you can
use a procedural texture to drive a ramp.
| | 00:22 | That way you can get as many colors
as you need, and you can get much finer
| | 00:26 | control over the look of your material.
| | 00:29 | I have got a plane here.
| | 00:30 | I'll select it and right-click to assign a New Material.
| | 00:33 | It will just be a Lambert material.
I want to drop a procedural texture into
| | 00:39 | the color here, so I will click on Create
Render Node and let's try a 2D texture Mountain.
| | 00:47 | You can see it here now.
| | 00:48 | It will never look good in the Viewport.
| | 00:50 | You will have to do a rendering
in order to see its true look.
| | 00:54 | Well, we can get a sense of their colors here.
You can see I have got Snow Color
| | 00:58 | and Rock Color and I can change those up.
| | 01:02 | But I don't have the ability to, for example
have three levels of color; maybe a
| | 01:06 | snow color, a forest color, and then an earth color.
| | 01:11 | To do that, I will want to use a Ramp.
| | 01:13 | Let's go to the Hypershade, open that up,
select this Lambert material and graph
| | 01:22 | the network and I also need a Ramp map.
| | 01:26 | I will go over to 2D Textures here and
click on Ramp and I have got a map now.
| | 01:33 | I want to assign that ramp to be the
color of the material here, select the
| | 01:37 | material and middle-mouse drag
the ramp on to that color slot.
| | 01:41 | That of course breaks the
connection that I made earlier.
| | 01:44 | You can see here now, I have
got a ramp across that surface.
| | 01:48 | I can go away to that ramp and change
those colors up, maybe the top here can be
| | 01:52 | a white snow, maybe the second flag
there can be like a forest green, and in the
| | 01:59 | bottom one perhaps I could set that to be a brownish color.
| | 02:03 | Now I have got different colors on my ramp.
Of course I can add as many of
| | 02:08 | those little color swatches I need to.
| | 02:10 | So you can see I have got the ramp on this surface.
| | 02:13 | The final thing I want to do is, I want
to take the out Alpha of the mountain
| | 02:17 | texture and use that to drive the V coordinates of the ramp.
| | 02:22 | I will select that mountain material
and then right-click on it on the lower
| | 02:28 | right hand corner to get its outputs.
You will see I have a choice of outAlpha or outColor.
| | 02:33 | It will have to be outAlpha, because
that's a single floating point number and
| | 02:38 | that's what the V coordinate expects to see.
| | 02:41 | When I release the mouse here, I can
now see that I have got a connection wire.
| | 02:45 | I can go over to the lower left corner
of the ramp and left-click on that.
| | 02:50 | I don't see the V coordinate Attribute listed here,
but I can go to Other.
| | 02:56 | That's going to launch up the Connection Editor.
I've got Mountain1 as an
| | 03:00 | output of the left and ramp1 as an input on the right.
| | 03:03 | I want to take the outAlpha attribute from the mountain.
| | 03:07 | So let's find that outAlpha, here it is.
I want to connect that to vCoord,
| | 03:12 | I will click on that.
| | 03:21 | Now that connection has been made,
I can close the Connection Editor.
| | 03:25 | You can see the connections here now.
| | 03:26 | Let's just clean up the graph a bit.
You can see mountain1 outAlpha, is now
| | 03:34 | connected to ramp1 vCoord and we
have got a nice colorful material now.
| | 03:38 | I can do a render of that.
| | 03:41 | We can go back and change all those
attributes and fine tune our look. I can go
| | 03:45 | into the ramp, maybe change the ramp
flag positions, or colors or likewise,
| | 03:53 | I can go back to the mountain texture
and play around with its attributes.
| | 03:57 | Of course, it would be easier to see that if I did an IPR.
| | 04:05 | Play around with some of those values
and see what I can do.
| | 04:08 | All right, very cool!
| | 04:09 | So that's a really basic technique in Maya,
but it's one that's not immediately
| | 04:14 | obvious and you wouldn't really be
able to figure out how to do that just by
| | 04:18 | looking at the interface.
| | 04:19 | But that's the principle.
| | 04:20 | You can take any floating-point number,
including the alpha of a procedural
| | 04:24 | texture and use that to drive the coordinates of a ramp.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Modifying colors with Remap HSV| 00:00 | Here's another way to alter the colors
of a procedural texture or any texture
| | 00:05 | for that matter. I've got an object
already with the material assigned. I just
| | 00:10 | want to hit Ctrl+A to open up its
attributes and go to that material.
| | 00:14 | I'll plug-in a map in the color slot here.
| | 00:17 | Click on Create Render Node.
| | 00:19 | Let's give it a 2D Fractal texture.
| | 00:22 | You can see that that's just black and white.
| | 00:24 | I don't even have any color slots to play around
with, like I did in the mountain texture.
| | 00:29 | Now of course we could play around with
the color balance here, but that's going
| | 00:32 | to be very limited in its effectiveness.
I won't be able, for example, to have two
| | 00:37 | different hues on the texture, but if
you scroll down just a little bit further
| | 00:42 | you'll see there is a section that says
Effects. Inside there is Color
| | 00:46 | Remap>Insert and if you click on that
what happens is a couple of nodes are
| | 00:51 | created in the Hypershade and we're
back to using a Ramp as our color source.
| | 00:58 | Let's just take a quick look at what happened.
| | 01:00 | We will go into Window>Rendering Editors
>Hypershade and graph the network here.
| | 01:08 | Right-click and Graph Network, then
you can see that we have a Fractal Node,
| | 01:13 | it's feeding into this Utility Node RGB
to HSV and that in turn is driving the
| | 01:19 | coordinates of this Ramp.
You can do that inside any texture in Maya.
| | 01:24 | You can just take the colors of the texture
and immediately remap them as you see here.
| | 01:29 | Of course, we could change up these colors
and make them prettier in a usual way.
| | 01:35 | That is how you use the Remap function
to change the color of any texture in Maya.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Building substance textures| 00:00 | In my opinion one of the most exciting
features to be added to Maya in recent
| | 00:04 | years is the Substance Texture Node.
| | 00:08 | This is a procedural texture that will
produce realistic results for things like
| | 00:13 | concrete and bricks and bronze and things like that.
| | 00:17 | Substances are procedural textures, but
they behave as if they were file textures.
| | 00:23 | In other words, you have to link to
a particular substance file.
| | 00:28 | That could be problematic, especially
if in the future the substance library that
| | 00:33 | ships with Maya changes.
| | 00:35 | I've been bitten by this before with 3ds Max
and other programs that use texture libraries.
| | 00:42 | If the texture library changes in the
future and you haven't backed up the files
| | 00:48 | that you used in your project, then
your scene will not open correctly and you
| | 00:52 | may actually not be able to open the scene completely.
| | 00:56 | Therefore, I strongly recommend that if
you do use substance textures, that you
| | 01:00 | simply just copy the entire substance
library into the source images of your
| | 01:05 | current Maya project. They're such
tiny files, you're not using up any disk
| | 01:10 | space, so there's no reason not to do this.
| | 01:12 | Again, if you fail to do this,
it's a high probability that later in the
| | 01:17 | future, someday those libraries
will change, and your scenes won't open
| | 01:21 | correctly. So let's future proof our work.
| | 01:25 | To do that we need to find the Maya
program directory. On Windows, it's on
| | 01:30 | your C drive under Program Files.
On the Mac of course, it's in your
| | 01:34 | Applications folder, but either way you
need to find your Maya install directory.
| | 01:39 | Within that you will find a folder
called Substances. You can just select
| | 01:43 | that and copy the entire folder.
Here I can just right-click and choose Copy.
| | 01:49 | Go to your current project, in this
case it's the exercise files, and go to
| | 01:53 | sourceimages and paste into there.
| | 01:57 | In this case, I can just right-click and choose Paste.
| | 02:01 | It only takes a second, because
those substance files are very small.
| | 02:04 | If I open that up and look at those,
each one is only a few kilobytes. So that
| | 02:09 | whole folder is only maybe 1 megabyte in size.
| | 02:13 | So I've copied the substance files over
into my current projects sourceimages.
| | 02:18 | So let's go to Maya, I have already got
that running. I have got a back wall
| | 02:23 | here and I can use the substance node
to create a procedural brick pattern that
| | 02:27 | looks pretty realistic.
| | 02:28 | I'll select that back wall, right-click
and Assign a New Material, and let's
| | 02:34 | make it a Blinn material if we want
shiny highlights. I'll call this one
| | 02:38 | brickSubstance_blinn. I can add the
substance to the Color Channel here, so
| | 02:47 | I'll click to Create a Render Node.
Its a 2D Texture and I want to choose
| | 02:53 | Substance, not Substance Output, that's
the Utility Node that you'll need if you
| | 02:58 | build your own substance networks.
| | 02:59 | But we don't need to do that in
this case. All we need to do is create
| | 03:02 | the substance node and the substance
output nodes will be built for us automatically.
| | 03:06 | I'll click on Substance and now I've got the
Texture Settings for the substance node visible.
| | 03:14 | However, there's no file present, so I'll need
to browse for that file, just as if it were a bitmap.
| | 03:20 | Once again, I want to make sure that
I'm linking to a substance file
| | 03:25 | that's inside my current project's
sourceimages. In fact, I want to
| | 03:30 | mention also that, if you don't do
this, then at this stage you'll have to
| | 03:33 | literally drill around to your program
files directory, or on the case of the
| | 03:39 | Mac, your application folder.
| | 03:41 | You'll have to navigate and find that.
That's problematic for a lot of reasons.
| | 03:46 | You never want to link to anything
that's outside your current project folder
| | 03:50 | because that's just really terrible asset management.
| | 03:53 | So I'll place the substances inside my
current project, drill down in there.
| | 03:59 | Let's go for let's say, BrickWall_05,
click Open. So we've got bricks, and those
| | 04:06 | bricks are fully procedural. We
can go into the substance node and play
| | 04:10 | around with that, so I'm still looking
at the blinn material node here.
| | 04:15 | I want to go to the substance texture node.
| | 04:18 | Here it is, substance1. Currently
all I have connected is the Diffuse
| | 04:22 | channel, but we can play around a lot
with that. You can scroll down here and
| | 04:27 | you can see I've got things like the
Hue Shift. If I don't like that sort of
| | 04:31 | peach color, maybe I want the
traditional red color to my bricks, and I have
| | 04:35 | got saturation and so on.
All of these parameters can be adjusted and
| | 04:40 | actually even animated.
| | 04:42 | You've got lots of stuff to play with,
like the number of bricks. Again,
| | 04:46 | it's all procedural. It will be pretty good-looking.
| | 04:50 | I mean it's not really going to
have an obvious tiling pattern to it.
| | 04:56 | So that's just the Diffuse channel.
| | 04:58 | If I want also, for example, a Bump or
Specular, I can go back up to the top here,
| | 05:03 | and I can just click on any one of
these to create an output node and plug that
| | 05:08 | output node into my current material.
| | 05:11 | You could also click this button that says
Create Shader Network. What that's
| | 05:14 | going to do is it's going to selectively create connections.
| | 05:19 | It'll, by default, create a Specular and a Normal Map.
| | 05:23 | In this case I don't want a Normal Map.
I just want to click on Bump and that creates it.
| | 05:28 | Now once that's in there, I can now play
around with things like the amount
| | 05:32 | of Embossment so on. That will show up as a Bump Map.
| | 05:36 | If I get in really close on our substance,
you can see that it's kind of got a bitmap-like quality.
| | 05:41 | If you want to increase that quality,
you can go up into the general
| | 05:46 | parameters here and you got the Absolute width
of the texture and that's locked to the height.
| | 05:52 | If I increase that up to let say 1024,
then you see we get a much better quality,
| | 05:56 | so that would be better in a close-up.
| | 05:58 | There are a lot of parameters to play
with here and each one of the substance
| | 06:03 | types has different parameters.
| | 06:05 | I will leave it to you to experiment with those.
| | 06:08 | The last thing I will mention is that
if you got something you like, you have
| | 06:12 | the option to directly export those images to disk here.
| | 06:16 | You see that there is a big button. You
can just click on that and you want to
| | 06:20 | export that of course into your
sourceimages folder, as usual.
| | 06:23 | So I want to make sure that when
I create this, it will be placed into my
| | 06:28 | sourceimages folder. We've got a value
here for the Map Width and Height
| | 06:32 | and that's actually independent of this value here.
| | 06:35 | So if I wanted it to match, I will
need to increase that up to 1024.
| | 06:39 | As always, I would recommend never
exporting to a JPEG file, because it's
| | 06:43 | lossy compressed, so you can export to a PNG.
| | 06:47 | If you clicked Create Shader Network,
you would create a new material and can
| | 06:52 | connect these new maps that we were
making to that new material, but I'm going
| | 06:57 | to choose not to do that in this case.
| | 06:59 | I will just leave this as a procedural substance texture.
| | 07:02 | Go ahead and click Export
and those should have been created.
| | 07:06 | I can go to the window that I have here,
which is my exercise files. Under
| | 07:11 | sourceimages now, you'll see I've got a
Bump_substance and a Diffuse_substance
| | 07:16 | and I can open those up and see what those look like.
| | 07:18 | It's actually going to launch in Photoshop in my case here.
| | 07:21 | I just want to examine that.
| | 07:22 | There you go, I've created a substance.
Then I have successfully baked it out
| | 07:27 | to its own bitmap, so I could use
that in a game engine or whatever.
| | 07:31 | Substance is really cool and you can
do a lot of great work with it.
| | 07:35 | I strongly recommend playing around.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Baking with Convert to File Texture| 00:00 | Procedural textures in Maya are great,
but you can't place those into a game
| | 00:05 | engine or into any other
application other than Maya.
| | 00:08 | If you need to export to a game engine
or some other program, then you need to
| | 00:13 | bake your procedural textures to File Bitmaps.
| | 00:16 | Let's take a look at how to do that in a
couple of ways, first in Maya Software.
| | 00:21 | I've got a lemon here that's got a Bump Map on it.
| | 00:23 | I want to convert that 3D Bump Map into a File Texture.
| | 00:28 | I need to go into Hypershade and here's the shader node.
| | 00:35 | What I need to do is I need to select
both the object and the shader.
| | 00:40 | I'll select the object and go up here and
Shift+Ctrl+Click to select both of those.
| | 00:47 | Then I can go up into the menu of
the Hypershade and under Edit, we've got
| | 00:53 | Convert to File Texture (Maya Software). That's important.
| | 00:57 | This relies on the Maya Software engine.
If you've got a texture that's not
| | 01:03 | compliant with Maya Software, then
you will not get any result from this.
| | 01:08 | So it's got to be something that
Maya Software is able to render.
| | 01:12 | Let's go into the Options for that.
| | 01:14 | If I reset this, you'll see that the
defaults are kind of not so great.
| | 01:20 | Anti-aliasing is turned off and the
Resolution is only 256 pixels and the format
| | 01:26 | is Alias PIX and none of those are good options.
| | 01:29 | I do want Anti-aliasing turned on, that's
going to prevent jagged edges in my texture.
| | 01:35 | I'll need to increase the Resolution here.
| | 01:38 | Let's set that up to 1024 x 1024 with
the Tab key and then the File Format.
| | 01:46 | The Alias format is readable by Maya, but nothing else.
| | 01:50 | I want to use a PNG, because that's a
really universal file format. So I'm good.
| | 01:55 | Just remember, I've got to have the
shader node selected and the object selected
| | 01:59 | because this process relies upon the
UVs of the object. When I click Convert
| | 02:06 | and Close, several things happen.
| | 02:09 | First of all, the file is baked. It's converted.
| | 02:13 | Second of all, it's stored in my
current source images directly and third of
| | 02:18 | all, a new material is created whether I want it or not.
| | 02:22 | Fourth of all, that material is now
assigned to the object, whether you like
| | 02:27 | it or not and you cannot change that behavior.
| | 02:30 | When you bake using that method,
you will lose the material assignment.
| | 02:34 | In other words, no longer is the procedural
texture and procedural shader applied.
| | 02:40 | Now an entirely new material has
been applied with the baked image.
| | 02:46 | So we can graph those two.
| | 02:47 | I can select those both and graph
their networks up here and you can see
| | 02:52 | they're quite similar, except one of them is a
3D Texture and the other one is a 2D Texture.
| | 02:59 | We just zoom in on those.
| | 03:02 | This is my original, of course.
| | 03:04 | We used a leather procedural texture
and a 3D bump node and that's no longer
| | 03:09 | assigned to the object.
| | 03:11 | Now assigned to the object is this new baked version.
| | 03:15 | All of the properties of the blinn shader have been inherited.
| | 03:18 | Basically that blinn material has
been duplicated and instead of a bump map
| | 03:24 | coming from leather, we're getting
a bump map coming from this file.
| | 03:28 | Where is that file? Well, it has just been dropped into our
| | 03:31 | sourceimages folder.
| | 03:32 | If I select that file node and go to Ctrl+A,
we can see that there it is.
| | 03:37 | It is sourceimages, and it's got the name
bump3d1-lemon_revolve_04, because that
| | 03:43 | was the name of the object.
| | 03:45 | If you don't like that name,
then you'll need to go into your File
| | 03:48 | Manager, change the name and then
you'll need to come back in here and
| | 03:52 | relink it if necessary.
| | 03:54 | Needless to say, if all you want to do
is export, then you probably want to
| | 04:00 | reassign the material if you don't
want to actually render the baked version.
| | 04:05 | Additionally, you'll notice just because
of the quirk in the software that we
| | 04:09 | don't see the bump map here,
and I'm in a high quality mode.
| | 04:12 | But if I go to Renderer>Viewport 2.0,
then we can see the bump map, and that
| | 04:18 | again is a file texture we're looking at.
| | 04:20 | It's just a strange incompatibility;
| | 04:23 | Viewport 2.0 doesn't properly render
the file texture as we saw.
| | 04:29 | But if I do a proper render, there you go!
| | 04:31 | That's the version that's got the
baked bump map. Let me store that.
| | 04:37 | I'll go back into my scene and right-click
and Reassign the Existing Material,
| | 04:42 | which was lemon1_blinn, was the original.
| | 04:46 | Then do another rendering of that,
so you can see the difference.
| | 04:50 | So that's the procedural version and
that's the bump file version. So you can
| | 04:56 | see there's a bit of a difference there.
| | 04:58 | But of course, all I would really
need to do to fix that up would be to
| | 05:02 | change the bump depth.
| | 05:03 | That's the process for baking textures.
Any texture that you have on the object will get baked.
| | 05:09 | When you use this tool, you don't get to
choose which of the texture maps get baked out.
| | 05:15 | It's an all or nothing deal.
So if I had a diffuse map on here,
| | 05:19 | that would've been baked out as well.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Baking with mental ray Batch Bake| 00:00 | Finally, let's look at baking with Mental Ray.
| | 00:03 | We can take any texture, procedural or a
bitmap, and bake that into a new shader.
| | 00:09 | We can include the lighting
and shadows in that process, too.
| | 00:13 | That's something that you would need
to do especially in game development,
| | 00:17 | so that you don't have to
calculate the lighting on your level.
| | 00:22 | You can just bake the lighting in directly.
| | 00:24 | You can do that with a Maya Software
method we saw in the previous movie, but
| | 00:29 | the Mental Ray method is just
going to give you better quality.
| | 00:33 | The only caveat with this is that in
order for it to work correctly, you'll need
| | 00:37 | to convert any NURBS objects into Polygons.
| | 00:41 | I've got a nurbs_revolve here for this
lemon and it really won't work exactly
| | 00:47 | right unless I convert to Polygons.
| | 00:49 | So I'll do that first.
| | 00:51 | I'll go to Modify>Convert>NURBS to
Polygons>Options and I do want to make sure
| | 00:59 | that I turn on this switch that
says Match Render Tessellation.
| | 01:02 | That's just going to make sure that
what I get after it's been converted to
| | 01:06 | Polygons, resembles what I saw in the actual rendering,
| | 01:11 | and it won't retessellate based upon these values.
| | 01:14 | So I want to match the render tessellation.
| | 01:17 | Go ahead and tessellate that.
| | 01:18 | Now I've got a new object which is called nurbsToPoly1.
| | 01:21 | Let me rename that and I'll call this one lemon_poly.
| | 01:28 | I've still got the original NURBS object in there.
| | 01:31 | I want to select that and either delete it
or hide it just so we're not distracted by that.
| | 01:37 | So I've got lemon_revolve_04 with the
object in question, just going to hide it
| | 01:42 | by setting its Visibility to 0.
| | 01:43 | So now I've got a Polygon object.
Now I'm ready to go ahead and bake this
| | 01:50 | into a bitmap and that'll actually
include the lighting and the bump as well.
| | 01:55 | That's going to be found in the Rendering menu set.
| | 01:58 | Under Lighting Shading>Batch Bake (Mental Ray),
we'll need to go to the Options for that.
| | 02:05 | Let me reset this, because we need to
change up a lot of these options.
| | 02:10 | First of all, I do want to include the shadows, if any.
| | 02:14 | I don't want to keep the original shading
network in this case, although you
| | 02:19 | might want to do that.
| | 02:20 | If you tick this switch on, then the baked
version will not appear on the object here.
| | 02:27 | In other words, it's not going to create a new material.
| | 02:29 | But let's keep it off this time.
| | 02:31 | It will create a new material and that will be
a better example of the power of this tool.
| | 02:36 | So what else we want to do> Bake optimization,
we really only want a single object in this case.
| | 02:41 | Then we want to customize the settings here.
| | 02:45 | To do that, I'll turn on the switch that says
| | 02:47 | Use bake set override and scrolling down here.
| | 02:52 | The most important thing here is the Color mode.
| | 02:54 | It says, Only light, which means it's
only going to bake the light into the
| | 02:58 | vertices and it'll ignore the textures completely.
| | 03:00 | I want to bake the Light and the color.
| | 03:03 | The Resolution is only 512 x 512 by default.
| | 03:06 | Let me turn that up to 1024.
| | 03:08 | The File format of TIFF is fine.
| | 03:10 | You'll see PNG is not an option here, so just leave it as TIFF.
| | 03:15 | Let's see if there is anything else
we need to do. I think that's it.
| | 03:19 | This tool is going to create a file
with a prefix baked on it. All right!
| | 03:24 | With the object selected, I'll click
Convert and Close and it will take a while.
| | 03:28 | If you look down here in the lower left, it says, Calculating.
| | 03:31 | So Mental Ray is working behind the scenes
to calculate all of the shadows and
| | 03:37 | reflections that might be on this object.
| | 03:39 | So it will take a little bit longer.
| | 03:41 | Give that a minute to finish.
| | 03:44 | We've baked out that texture including
the lighting. If I tumble around in my
| | 03:49 | scene, you'll see that in fact, we've
got some highlights here and those are
| | 03:52 | actually because there was a reflection.
| | 03:56 | There is light coming from the
outside that's shining on here.
| | 03:59 | That's, once again, a bitmap.
Let's find that bitmap, because it's in a
| | 04:05 | sort of super secret location.
| | 04:06 | Let me minimize Maya for a second.
| | 04:09 | Here is the bitmap that just got rendered out.
| | 04:11 | It's found in your current project under
renderData>mentalray>lightMap and
| | 04:19 | that's not really a terribly great place for
it to be, but that's where it gets dropped.
| | 04:24 | I would recommend that if you're going
to actually use this in production and
| | 04:28 | you want to render it this way, you
might want to take this file and move it
| | 04:32 | into your sourceimages and then relink the shader.
| | 04:36 | Basically, it's a good idea to have all of your
texture maps inside the sourceimages folder.
| | 04:42 | That's the process for baking.
| | 04:44 | Let's just take a look at that image real quick.
| | 04:47 | I'll open that up in Photoshop and you can see
what that looks like, with all of lighting included in it.
| | 04:52 | If you do this, you can also bake the
entire scene out at once and that's a
| | 04:56 | common thing that you'd do in building
game levels, is bake the texture and
| | 05:01 | lighting into all the walls and ceiling and floor and so on.
| | 05:05 | That's how you bake textures in Mental Ray.
That concludes our chapter on
| | 05:10 | adjusting and combining textures in Maya.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
8. Special EffectsConstructing a candle flame shader| 00:00 | In this chapter we'll look at special effects.
The first thing we want to
| | 00:05 | look at here is creating a candle flame,
which will be incandescent.
| | 00:10 | Additionally, you'll see that I've
place some lights inside these candle
| | 00:14 | flames, so that will actually illuminate
the room. Those lights are actually
| | 00:19 | inside the candle flames.
| | 00:21 | The flame itself, if I hit Ctrl+A and
look at its attributes, in the mesh shape
| | 00:25 | node you'll see under Render Stats I
have disabled Casts and Receive Shadows,
| | 00:29 | so that the light inside the candle flame
will be able to illuminate the rest of the room.
| | 00:35 | Okay. So let's create a candle flame shader.
| | 00:37 | I'll select the object and right-click
and choose Assign New Material.
| | 00:41 | This would be incandescent material
and I can just use a standard Lambert for
| | 00:45 | that, because I won't need any shiny
highlights. I'll rename it, call it
| | 00:50 | candleFlame_lambert. Fire flame
doesn't reflect light, so it will have no
| | 00:59 | diffuse component. We'll turn the
Color all the way down to black.
| | 01:03 | All we need to map in this case
are Incandescence and Transparency.
| | 01:08 | Let's go for Incandescence first.
| | 01:10 | I'll click to create a new render node
and it will be a Ramp, 2D Textures>Ramp.
| | 01:17 | Now that's fully self-illuminated as you can see.
| | 01:19 | Let's just play around with these colors here.
Instead of red at the bottom I want to give it a blue color.
| | 01:25 | In the middle I'll make it mostly white,
maybe a little bit of color on that,
| | 01:32 | and at the top, I'll set that to be a kind of a pinkish color.
| | 01:36 | Let's do that again.
| | 01:37 | Go back in there, change up the Hue of
that and make it kind of orangish.
| | 01:42 | v this one could be pure white.
| | 01:48 | You can see as I've played around
with that we can see the result here.
| | 01:51 | It's fully self-illuminated and it's not
affected by the lighting in the scene.
| | 01:57 | So that's the incandescence aspect.
| | 01:59 | The other thing I'd like to do
is give it some transparency.
| | 02:03 | I want it to be more opaque on the
edges and transparent in the center.
| | 02:07 | I'll go back up to the top level of the
material. For transparency here I'm
| | 02:12 | going to use a sampler info node, as
we saw earlier in the course to create
| | 02:19 | transparency based upon face angle.
| | 02:22 | But I know in this case that I want
to modulate that by a Remap Value node.
| | 02:27 | I'm going to click on Transparency to
create a new render node. That's going
| | 02:31 | to be a Remap Value Node found in
Utilities, looking for Remap Value there it is.
| | 02:40 | That's been applied and now I need to
plug something into this Input Value.
| | 02:44 | Let's go to the Hypershade to do that.
| | 02:45 | Let's graph the network of this candle flame.
I want to plug something into
| | 02:53 | that remapValue and it's going to be a
Sampler Info Node, I want to find the
| | 02:58 | facing ratio. It's going to be under
Utilities once again, I'm looking for
| | 03:03 | Sampler Info, here it is.
| | 03:06 | I just want to take the facing ratio
of Sampler Info and plug it into the
| | 03:10 | input of Remap Value.
| | 03:12 | Select the samplerInfo node, right-click on
the lower right-hand corner and choose facingRatio.
| | 03:18 | Go over to remapValue, left-click on
the lower left-hand side and set that to
| | 03:24 | inputValue. Now we have taken
samplerInfo facingRatio and plugged it into
| | 03:29 | the remapValue's inputValue.
| | 03:31 | So let's see what that looks like in our view.
| | 03:35 | We don't see much results here, just get in really close.
| | 03:38 | I just want to play around with the
color of that remap value. What you
| | 03:45 | see here is that we're getting an
edge effect here where we have less
| | 03:50 | transparency on the edges.
| | 03:52 | Let's do an interactive production render of
that, so we can see it little bit more clearly.
| | 03:58 | Once the IPR is calculated its initial pass
then I can draw a rectangle around
| | 04:03 | just the candle area and as I play with
this you can see it a little bit better
| | 04:06 | of what's happening.
| | 04:10 | That's the transparency based upon face angle.
| | 04:15 | Okay. So that's the first pass at our candle flame.
We'll want to add some glow to that.
| | 04:19 | We'll do that in the following movie.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using Shader Glow| 00:00 | We've added an incandescent material to
the candle flame, but it's not actually
| | 00:05 | glowing, and we want to have an
optical effect like a lens flare.
| | 00:08 | I want to select the object and go back to its material,
Ctrl+A to get the Attribute Editor open.
| | 00:14 | Go to that material and you'll see
there's a section in here that says Special
| | 00:18 | Effects. We can increase the Glow
Intensity, we bring that up all way.
| | 00:23 | Let's do an interactive production render.
| | 00:26 | Go up here and click on IPR.
| | 00:32 | Once the IPR has done its initial pass
I can drag a rectangle to choose the region
| | 00:37 | I want to re-render, and then
play around with the Glow Intensity.
| | 00:41 | Let's just let it finish rendering.
| | 00:45 | Once that's finished, then I can play
around with this Glow Intensity.
| | 00:47 | Bring that down and you can see how --
it's now really having much effect.
| | 00:51 | As I reduce that Glow Intensity, it
still seeming really, really bright.
| | 00:55 | The reason is that the glow is
automatically exposed, there's an Auto
| | 01:00 | Exposure that's happening here.
| | 01:02 | That will actually cause the glow
to flicker on subsequent frames.
| | 01:07 | If you want a controllable glow, then
you'll need to go into the shaderGlow Node
| | 01:12 | and make some changes. So let's do that.
| | 01:14 | We want to go into the Hypershade.
In the Hypershade you will see there is a
| | 01:22 | node that says shaderGlow1, and this is a read-only node.
| | 01:27 | It's one that cannot delete and you
cannot rename and it's always there.
| | 01:31 | There is only one shaderGlow node in a Maya scene.
| | 01:35 | You cannot duplicate it and you
cannot assign different shader glows to
| | 01:39 | different objects. Any and all objects
that have that glow attribute enabled
| | 01:43 | will be linked to this shaderGlow.
| | 01:46 | I'll go ahead and click it and now we've
got its parameters in the Attribute Editor.
| | 01:51 | Just so I don't accidentally lose this,
I'm going to just copy that Tab off to
| | 01:56 | its own window, because I need
to make a bunch of changes here.
| | 01:59 | So now I've got IPR active still and
I can start playing around with the
| | 02:03 | shaderGlow Attributes.
| | 02:05 | The first thing I'll do is turn Auto Exposure off.
You can see now it's changed in the IPR window.
| | 02:12 | Auto Exposure doesn't really do a good
job at giving us a quality glow effect,
| | 02:16 | so I recommend turning it off in all cases.
| | 02:19 | The shaderGlow node has actually two glows built into it.
| | 02:22 | There's Glow Type and Halo Type. They are actually identical.
| | 02:26 | I'm just going to focus on one at a time,
so I'll choose to turn the Halo Type
| | 02:31 | off by setting it to None.
| | 02:32 | So you can see we're getting a glow
effect there now, and then we just want to
| | 02:37 | open up the Glow Attributes and start playing.
| | 02:40 | You've got the Intensity and the Spread and also the Opacity.
| | 02:44 | What I like to do is reduce the Intensity
and increase the Spread, cause that to
| | 02:49 | go out a little bit more.
| | 02:51 | I want a really low Intensity and a high Spread
in this case to get that candle flame look.
| | 02:56 | So maybe a low intensity of I don't know
.1 maybe? And a high Spread cause that
| | 03:02 | to really spread out.
| | 03:03 | Maybe even lower Glow Intensity .05.
| | 03:08 | Additionally the Glow Opacity is
really helpful, I'll turn that up all the way.
| | 03:13 | What that does is it actually looks at
the colors of the object and uses those colors.
| | 03:19 | So if I increase the intensity again
you can kind of see that, the edge here is
| | 03:23 | blue and the top is little bit orange.
| | 03:26 | Anyway, so you just need to play with
that until you get kind of the look that
| | 03:31 | you want. Maybe I've got one have a
little bit lower spread amount.
| | 03:37 | IPR makes it really easy for you to
kind of dial in the look that you want.
| | 03:42 | Now this is going to be view dependent.
| | 03:44 | If I back up and look at this from the
other side of the room it's going to look
| | 03:48 | different, and we may not even see a glow effect.
| | 03:50 | If I dolly back and do another IPR,
then we'll see that the glow might not even
| | 03:59 | be visible or might be so dim as to be not really convincing.
| | 04:03 | We'll let that finish. Then I'll drag
a rectangle around that area and once
| | 04:09 | again start playing around with these
values. Maybe increase the Spread and the
| | 04:13 | Intensity so that we can actually see
that glow from across the room.
| | 04:20 | Maybe drag another rectangle around that.
| | 04:21 | So I think I want a lower spread, there we go.
| | 04:28 | The point is you're going to need to adjust
the glow depending upon where your
| | 04:32 | camera is relative to the object that you're rendering.
| | 04:38 | I could probably go back and play around
with the Shader itself, too, and make it
| | 04:41 | little bit less blue, but that's a
general principle of using shaderGlow.
| | 04:46 | Then if I want to, of course, I can assign
that material to the other objects.
| | 04:50 | Select those two other candle flames,
right-click and Assign Existing Material
| | 04:55 | candleFlame_lambert, and then just do another render.
| | 05:01 | You'll notice that the glow pops on
at the end of the rendering, and that's
| | 05:05 | actually important because the shaderGlow
is a 2d optical effect that's applied
| | 05:11 | after the main rendering.
| | 05:13 | So we got our glow on there. We can
also add an effect based upon the light
| | 05:18 | that's inside there, and we'll do that in the next movie.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding OpticalFX| 00:00 | Another way that we can add glow is to
create a glow node on a light,.
| | 00:06 | This is, in some ways, better than adding
shader glow to the material because we can
| | 00:11 | customize each light to be different
from the others if we need to.
| | 00:17 | To add glow to a light, simply select
the light, and go to the Attribute Editor,
| | 00:21 | Ctrl+A, and you'll see there is
a section labeled Light Effects.
| | 00:26 | We can go to the Light Glow section,
and click to create the render node.
| | 00:31 | It's created, and it's got a name called opticalFX.
| | 00:35 | That's the name of the node, and it's also the
name of this particular node in this case, opticalFX1.
| | 00:41 | You'll see the light is surrounded by a sphere.
| | 00:43 | That sphere is just an easy way for
you to select the optical effect, or the
| | 00:47 | light itself, and the size of the
sphere doesn't actually influence anything.
| | 00:53 | Here I am looking at the Optical FX Attributes.
| | 00:55 | What I want to do is of course do an IPR
so I can adjust these values. I'll click IPR;
| | 01:02 | let that finish rendering its first pass.
| | 01:04 | You'll see I've got a little bit of a star
there now, get that for free.
| | 01:10 | So let me drag a rectangle so I can
play around with some of these values.
| | 01:15 | I know that I want a greater intensity on this.
| | 01:18 | So I am going to increase the Intensity quite a lot.
| | 01:22 | But I want a little bit less spread,
maybe I'll give it a Spread of 0.5 or so.
| | 01:28 | I can play around with the Star Level.
| | 01:30 | What Star Level actually does is focus the star effect.
| | 01:34 | So high star level is going to result in very thin lines.
| | 01:39 | I'll set that to a value of let's say 5.
| | 01:42 | I've also got the Glow Opacity.
| | 01:45 | I can turn that up a bit.
| | 01:48 | I guess we're basically where we want to be with this.
| | 01:50 | Maybe a little bit more Glow Intensity, maybe 15.
| | 01:54 | I can also change the number of Star Points.
| | 01:56 | Let's give that a hexagonal pattern
with 6 points, and also maybe rotate
| | 02:01 | the star so that it's not lined up exactly
with the world, so it looks kind of interesting.
| | 02:06 | Well, that's our first Optical Effect.
| | 02:10 | If I want to apply that to the other lights
in my shot, then I'll need to do that manually.
| | 02:17 | I'll go ahead, and select the other light,
click Light Glow and create it, and
| | 02:22 | go to the third light, and once again, create the light glow.
| | 02:26 | But those will all have default values.
| | 02:28 | These new ones that I've created
are going to have default values.
| | 02:31 | If I render that, you'll see they look
different than the one that I've customized.
| | 02:35 | But it's easy to fix that.
| | 02:37 | Although I can't instance lights in Maya,
I can just grab the values from one
| | 02:43 | that I like and create a Preset,
and then plug that into the others.
| | 02:47 | This is a good one.
| | 02:49 | I just want to create a Preset, so in
the Attribute Editor, for the opticalFX
| | 02:53 | node, we'll go there, and we'll create a preset.
| | 02:57 | Hold down the Presets button,
and save opticalFX Preset.
| | 03:01 | Let's call it myOpticalFX, and click Save.
| | 03:08 | That's going to get saved in my
current user's Presets folder.
| | 03:14 | To assign that preset to the other lights,
I'll select the light and go to its
| | 03:20 | opticalFX Attributes and you'll
see Presets is highlighted here.
| | 03:25 | It's got a little star next to it, meaning
that a preset exists for this node.
| | 03:29 | I can hold down the mouse and choose
myOpticalFX>Replace and that will replace
| | 03:36 | the existing values with the ones from the preset.
| | 03:38 | I will repeat that process for the third one.
| | 03:41 | Hold down Presets, and choose myOpticalFX>
Replace and then do a final render. Very good!
| | 03:48 | So that's how we can apply glow to lights in Maya.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Building a nonphotoreal shading network| 00:00 | One of my favorite things about Maya is the ability
to create non-photo real renderings like this one.
| | 00:06 | It looks like a medieval engraving.
| | 00:09 | I did this by combining share nodes
in a network. Let's take a look at
| | 00:14 | how this was done so you can kind
of wrap your head around the process.
| | 00:18 | I've got the Hypershade window open here.
| | 00:20 | Let me maximize that, and give us lots of space.
| | 00:23 | I'll close up some of these other panels so
we can kind of analyze what's going on here.
| | 00:27 | What we have here is at the very end
of the chain, the top level, the root of
| | 00:33 | the material is a surface shader.
| | 00:34 | It's not actually responding to light at all.
| | 00:37 | Of course, we can see that there's
a lighting effect in that rendering.
| | 00:41 | But that's actually being derived
from this Lambert shader over here.
| | 00:45 | Now this is kind of interesting.
| | 00:48 | What I've done is I've combined the
Lambert material with a ramp texture and
| | 00:56 | added them both together. That's
something that's kind of unique in Maya.
| | 01:01 | I mean other programs can do it, but I
was raised with programs like 3ds Max
| | 01:07 | in which a texture is a texture, and a material
is a material, and never the twain shall meet.
| | 01:13 | In other words, you can't just take a
material and make that an input to a
| | 01:17 | texture in 3ds Max, but here in Maya, we can.
| | 01:21 | That's the key to making this particular
non-photo real, or NPR, shader work.
| | 01:28 | I'm combining the ramp with the lighting
from the scene, and then using a remap
| | 01:34 | value node to cut a threshold, so that
certain areas will be completely white
| | 01:40 | and certain areas completely black.
| | 01:43 | Additionally, I've added a little bit of noise to the mix here.
| | 01:46 | You'll see there's a Brownian noise texture,
and that's just there to sort of
| | 01:50 | randomize the line a little bit.
| | 01:52 | That's the basic principle here.
We can multiply that whole thing by 2
| | 01:56 | because in fact I've got a U direction
ramp and also a V direction ramp, you
| | 02:01 | will see ramp U here and ramp V.
That's the essential process for creating this
| | 02:06 | particular non-photo real shader.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating an ideal diffuse shader| 00:00 | The first step in creating our non-photo real
shading network is to build an ideal diffuse material.
| | 00:08 | By ideal diffuse, what I mean is
that all of the light striking the object
| | 00:13 | will reflect off the object.
| | 00:16 | If there are no additional fill lights in
the scene, if we have a key light
| | 00:21 | only, then the shadows are absolutely
black, and the highlights are 100% white.
| | 00:26 | As you see, I've got three lights in my scene;
| | 00:29 | I've got a key, a fill, and a back light.
| | 00:32 | So there will never be any area of
the screen that will be 100% black.
| | 00:38 | But we will get hotspots that are perfectly white.
| | 00:41 | The important thing again is that
we have an ideal diffuse shader
| | 00:45 | that's capturing all the light.
| | 00:46 | I'm going to select all the geometry in
the scene and go to right-click, choose
| | 00:51 | Assign New Material, and that will be
a Lambert material, and I'll rename it.
| | 00:56 | I'll call it ideal_diffuse_lambert.
| | 01:01 | It just needs to have a color of white,
100% white, and a Diffuse amount of 1,
| | 01:09 | so that we're not dimming down the Lambert Shader.
| | 01:13 | That's the first step towards creating our
non-photo real and grading shader.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a noisy ramp| 00:00 | The next step in creating our
shader is to create a noisy ramp.
| | 00:05 | I want a ramp that varies from black to
white to create the lines of the engraving.
| | 00:10 | But I want it to be a wiggly line.
| | 00:12 | I don't want it to be perfectly straight
because that doesn't look handmade.
| | 00:16 | Let's go into the Hypershade;
| | 00:18 | Window>Rendering Editors>Hypershade, and I
will go ahead and create a ramp, 2D Texture>Ramp.
| | 00:26 | Before I adjust the ramp properties,
I am just going to go to the 2D Texture
| | 00:31 | Placement node, and crank up the repeats.
| | 00:33 | I need lots and lots of lines here.
| | 00:35 | So I'll set the Repeat U and Repeat V both to 30.
| | 00:39 | Now you can see that I am getting
a lot of repeats on the ramp here.
| | 00:42 | Now I will go to the ramp texture, and what
I want is on either ends of the ramp, black.
| | 00:49 | So I will go ahead and select these colors
here and set that to black on either end here.
| | 00:55 | In the center I want that to be white.
| | 00:57 | Let's add some noise to this.
| | 01:02 | You'll see there's a Noise slider here.
| | 01:04 | As I increase that, you'll see it in the sample swatch here.
| | 01:09 | But currently, we're not seeing it in the
actual ramp itself, in the Attribute Editor.
| | 01:14 | I'll set the Noise Amount to let's say about 0.3,
and I need to change the Noise Frequency
| | 01:19 | because it's too high. I need
a lower frequency noise that's going to
| | 01:24 | be just kind of a wiggly line.
| | 01:25 | If I bring this Frequency down,
you'll see what I am talking about.
| | 01:29 | Low frequency means a long wavelength.
| | 01:32 | Let's set that Noise Frequency to maybe 0.01,
so you have just a little bit of
| | 01:38 | wiggle on that line. All right!
| | 01:42 | I am going to rename this while I am at it.
| | 01:44 | I am going to end up with two of these.
| | 01:47 | This is the V Ramp here, so I'll rename this,
I'll call this ramp_V.
| | 01:51 | There is already one in my scene here,
so I'll just call it ramp_v with a lowercase.
| | 01:55 | So that's our noisy ramp.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding colors| 00:00 | We've got an ideal diffuse material
and we've also got a noisy ramp.
| | 00:05 | Now we're ready to add the two together.
| | 00:08 | We'll find the Add Node under Utilities
in then Create panel over here.
| | 00:12 | What we're looking for is Add,
but it's actually not called Add.
| | 00:19 | It's called +|- Average.
| | 00:22 | Go ahead and click on that and now
I've got a new plusminusaverage node.
| | 00:28 | To keep my scene clean I want to rename this.
| | 00:30 | I'll call it plusminusaverage_v.
| | 00:35 | Now the plusminusaverage node has
different operations you'll see here.
| | 00:40 | The one of course I want is Sum,
because I'm adding two things together.
| | 00:45 | We could add just one dimension
or two dimensions or three dimensions.
| | 00:49 | It doesn't really matter whether we do
one dimension or three dimensions in this case,
| | 00:53 | because it's a black-and-white ramp.
| | 00:56 | So it's a monochrome and the red, green,
and blue values will all be the same.
| | 01:02 | But I will go ahead and use Input 3D in this case.
| | 01:05 | Maybe in some of your own scenes
you might want to use color.
| | 01:08 | So we'll do it that way.
| | 01:10 | We will use of 3D input that accepts red, green, and blue.
| | 01:13 | I'll right-click on the lower right hand
corner of my ramp and choose
| | 01:17 | outColor>outColor, and then left-click
on the lower left hand corner of my
| | 01:23 | plusminusaverage node.
| | 01:25 | I want to send that to in an input,
a 3D input in this case, and I just choose
| | 01:30 | the first one in the list.
| | 01:32 | Now you'll see that's showing up here.
| | 01:34 | We see there is now a new item in this
Input 3D section. That's half of it.
| | 01:39 | The other half is I want to get my ideal
diffuse material in here. So here it is.
| | 01:44 | I'll just grab that select it with the
left mouse and then middle-mouse drag it
| | 01:49 | and now it's in the work area here.
| | 01:52 | Once again I want to right-click
on the lower right-hand corner
| | 01:55 | and choose outColor>outColor.
| | 01:57 | If they didn't work the first time,
just make sure it's selected.
| | 02:00 | Right-click>outColor>outColor.
| | 02:03 | Now I've got my wire and I can go over
here at left-click and choose Input 3D
| | 02:10 | and select the one that we haven't already connected.
| | 02:13 | If I select that and you can see it.
| | 02:17 | Let's see what that looks like now.
| | 02:19 | If we assign that to our objects in the scene.
I need to have a Surface Shader in order to do this.
| | 02:26 | So go back up into the Maya Surface
materials and I'll click Surface Shader.
| | 02:32 | Let me give that in name.
| | 02:33 | I'll call it engrave_surfaceshader.
| | 02:38 | I'll take the plusminusaverage output
and put that into the outColor here.
| | 02:44 | In fact, I can just middle-mouse drag
to make that connection.
| | 02:47 | So we got something here.
| | 02:49 | Look at that, if we zoom in on that.
| | 02:52 | You can see now that the white ideal diffuse
is adding to the ramp that I created earlier.
| | 03:00 | Pretty cool.
| | 03:01 | So I'll go ahead and select all my geometry
and assign that Surface Shader.
| | 03:06 | I'll right-click and choose Assign Existing Material>
engrave_surfaceshader.
| | 03:13 | We won't be able to see this in the viewport.
| | 03:15 | It will just render as black.
It doesn't matter which of these display modes
| | 03:20 | you go into, you won't be able to see
the output of that Surface Shader, because
| | 03:25 | it's accepting an input from a
plusminusaverage node. That's just not really
| | 03:30 | going to work in the viewport here,
but I can go ahead and do a quick render.
| | 03:34 | The render is actually going to be very fast.
| | 03:36 | So we made some progress here.
| | 03:38 | You can see that there's actually a
little bit of variation in the width of the
| | 03:42 | line based upon the brightness of the surface.
| | 03:44 | That includes the shadows here,
because my lights are casting shadows.
| | 03:48 | So we're making progress.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Setting a threshold with Remap Value| 00:00 | We made a good start towards our
non-photo real engraving shader.
| | 00:04 | What we are seeing now is just the ramp
being added to the ideal diffuse material.
| | 00:11 | What we want is to have a black line
that varies in width depending upon the
| | 00:16 | brightness of that material.
| | 00:17 | Let's go back into the Hypershade.
| | 00:20 | I have got it minimized down here.
| | 00:21 | What we want to do is take the output of
this plusminusaverage node and pipe it
| | 00:26 | through a re-map value node.
| | 00:28 | So we can set a threshold or a cutoff.
| | 00:30 | Now there are a multiple ways to do this.
| | 00:33 | As I say there are many ways to skin a cat,
especially in 3D and extra especially in Maya.
| | 00:38 | You have lots of choices for how you want to do something.
| | 00:41 | In this case, for example, I could use
a Condition node and that would
| | 00:44 | accomplish the same thing.
| | 00:46 | But I like to use a Remap Value node,
because it will give us a visual interface.
| | 00:50 | We can actually move a graph around
and see the results in real time and adjust
| | 00:56 | our shader to do it in more artistic fashion.
| | 00:59 | So let's create this Remap Value node.
| | 01:01 | It's going to be found in the Utility section here.
| | 01:05 | Scroll down a little bit looking for Remap Value.
| | 01:10 | Here it is. Create that.
| | 01:14 | Then we want to actually make these connections.
| | 01:16 | Here's the thing Remap Value, the way
I am going to use it here now, I want to
| | 01:21 | use it in a one-dimensional fashion.
| | 01:23 | In other words, I just want a single graph
that I can adjust to set a cutoff threshold.
| | 01:28 | Currently, my plusminusaverage is operating in RGB space.
| | 01:33 | It's using a three-dimensional space.
| | 01:36 | So I just want to take one of those
three values since they are all the same,
| | 01:40 | anyway and it's black and white.
| | 01:42 | So what I want to do is delete this connection.
I'll click on that wire and press
| | 01:46 | the Delete key on the keyboard.
| | 01:49 | I want to take one of these plusminusaverage outputs.
| | 01:51 | So I will right-click in the lower right-hand corner of that.
| | 01:54 | Again, we are using a 3D summation.
| | 01:56 | So I want to use output3D and I can take
output3D X, Y, or Z. Any of those would
| | 02:02 | work just fine, because they are all the same.
| | 02:04 | Then I want to connect that to the input
of the Remap Value, left-click on that
| | 02:09 | and choose Input Value.
| | 02:12 | Now that's wired up.
| | 02:13 | Now I want to take the Remap Value node
and plug it into a surfaceShader.
| | 02:18 | But once again, if I will use a one-dimensional
aspect of the Remap Value, what
| | 02:23 | I will need to do is take the 1D output
of Remap Value and plug it in three
| | 02:29 | times to my engraving surfaceShader.
| | 02:32 | If I open up the Attribute Editor for
the Remap Value node, what I am talking
| | 02:37 | about is I want to use this value graph
to set the threshold, that's just
| | 02:41 | going to be more intuitive.
| | 02:43 | That's a one-dimensional value.
| | 02:45 | So I will just take three copies of that
one-dimensional value and send each one
| | 02:50 | of those to the red, green, and blue
channels of the surfaceShader here.
| | 02:54 | I will right-click on the Remap Value node
and choose outValue.
| | 02:58 | Go over to the engrave_surfaceShader,
left-click on that. You don't see the
| | 03:04 | outValue or the color of the surfaceShader
listed here, because Maya knows that
| | 03:09 | I'm trying to connect a single floating-point value.
| | 03:13 | The only ones available currently
are the Alpha Gain displacement map.
| | 03:17 | So color is not a floating-point value.
| | 03:19 | It's a vector or three value attribute.
| | 03:22 | That's why it's not showing up in the list here.
| | 03:25 | But I can just choose Other and that
will launch up the Connection Editor.
| | 03:29 | I want to take the outValue from the
Remap Value node and plug it into the
| | 03:33 | outColor of the surfaceShader.
| | 03:36 | Scroll down, I am looking for outColor,
but I need do open that up and connect it
| | 03:40 | to outColor red, green, and blue.
Now all those connections are made.
| | 03:47 | Cool. In order to see the effect
here we should use the IPR.
| | 03:51 | I am going to go ahead and select my
Remap Value node and I will go back to my
| | 03:59 | Render View here and click Interactive Production Render.
| | 04:03 | That's going to look pretty grainy when
we start working on this. So don't panic.
| | 04:08 | It's going to be grainy in the IPR, but it
will be fine when you do a proper render.
| | 04:13 | So let's start tweaking this Remap Value curve.
| | 04:16 | If I move these points around, oh, we've
got to drag a box around here to see our IPR.
| | 04:22 | There we go.
| | 04:23 | So if we move this point around, you'll see that
we are affecting the contrast and brightness here.
| | 04:31 | So what I want is just no interpolation.
| | 04:34 | I want just a cutoff threshold.
| | 04:37 | So for this first point on the graph here
I will set its Interpolation type to None.
| | 04:44 | The second point on this graph here
controls the threshold. Oh cool!
| | 04:50 | So that's pretty good.
| | 04:52 | Let's see that looks like with a full render. Pretty nice!
| | 04:56 | So we can keep adding to that or keep
adjusting that until we get a look that we want,
| | 05:00 | but that's the essential process.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Multiplying values| 00:00 | We've got half of our engraving shader.
| | 00:02 | We've got lines running in one dimension,
in the V dimension of the surfaces of the models.
| | 00:07 | I'd like to mention that in order
for something like this to work;
| | 00:11 | you got to have good UVs.
| | 00:13 | I did spend a fair amount of time scaling
the UVs on each model to make sure
| | 00:18 | that all the lines are approximately the
same distance apart, the same size, so it
| | 00:23 | look like everything was in the same drawing.
| | 00:25 | Well, we've got half of it done.
| | 00:27 | Now we need to put in the other half.
| | 00:29 | We want lines running in the U dimension.
| | 00:31 | I'll go to the Hypershade, which I've got minimized here.
| | 00:33 | While I am here, I just want to rename
this Remap Value node, because it's
| | 00:37 | currently named remapValue16.
| | 00:38 | So let's clean that up.
| | 00:40 | I will call that remapValue_v.
| | 00:43 | So I want to duplicate some of these nodes.
| | 00:45 | I need a new ramp that's a U ramp.
| | 00:47 | I need to add that to the ideal Diffuse Lambert,
and then I need to set a threshold.
| | 00:52 | So these three nodes need to be duplicated.
| | 00:54 | To save myself the time of reconnecting
all these connections, I can duplicate
| | 01:00 | part of the shader network
and then delete the parts I don't need.
| | 01:04 | I've selected remapValue_v, I'll go up
into the Edit menu in the Hypershade, and
| | 01:09 | I will go to Duplicate>Shading Network.
| | 01:11 | Now you will see I've got remapValue_v1 over here.
| | 01:16 | Let's clean up the display here by rearranging the graph.
| | 01:19 | I need to go around and clean up a bunch of stuff here.
| | 01:22 | So remapValue_v1, I want to rename that
to remapValue_u; plus-minus average v1
| | 01:29 | is going to be plus-minus average u;
and ramp_v1 is going to be ramp_u.
| | 01:36 | While I am here, I'll change the Type
to U Ramp, and that will cause the
| | 01:41 | lines to run in the opposite direction as you can see.
| | 01:44 | These are running up and down,
these are running left and right.
| | 01:47 | So I have done that.
| | 01:48 | Now I've got duplicate nodes here.
| | 01:49 | These are redundant.
| | 01:51 | This texture placement node is unnecessary
because I can just use this one.
| | 01:54 | Likewise, I don't need another ideal Diffuse Lambert.
| | 01:58 | So what I will do is I will Ctrl+Shift+Select
these two nodes and delete them,
| | 02:02 | and then connect these to the existing nodes.
| | 02:06 | So the place2dTexture node here, I want
to right-click on the lower right-hand
| | 02:10 | corner, and choose outUV>outUV.
| | 02:13 | Go over here and left-click.
| | 02:15 | I was hoping to see uvCoord as one
of the inputs that I am able to connect to,
| | 02:20 | but for some reason, that's not showing up.
| | 02:22 | So I just have to go to default, which
launches up the Connection Editor.
| | 02:26 | I want to take outUV from that Texture Placement
node and connect it to uvCoord on the ramp.
| | 02:33 | As soon as I do that, you can see now
I am getting lots of repeats on ramp_u.
| | 02:38 | So that's one.
| | 02:38 | Then the other one I want to do is
I want to take ideal_diffuse, and plug that
| | 02:44 | into this plusMinusAverage node.
| | 02:46 | So I will right-click over here
and choose outColor>outColor, and then
| | 02:50 | left-click on the plusMinusAverage node,
and send that to one of the 3D input
| | 02:55 | slots that's available here;
| | 02:57 | input3D>1. So I've made all those
connections, let's rearrange the graph,
| | 03:03 | clean this up, and then let's just
admire what we've done here.
| | 03:07 | So you've got two branches to our shader tree.
| | 03:09 | We've got the V branch that's running
this way, and we've got the U branch
| | 03:13 | that's running down this way.
| | 03:15 | All I want to do now is multiply those two branches together.
| | 03:20 | What that will do is ensure that
the only places we'll see white on the surface
| | 03:25 | shader are places where both U and V
are white. That will end up giving us
| | 03:33 | two sets of intersecting black lines.
| | 03:36 | So let's create a Multiply Divide node.
| | 03:38 | Go back to my Create section over here.
In Utilities area, we want to find Multiply Divide.
| | 03:47 | Here it is, Multiply Divide.
| | 03:48 | Click on that, and I've got a Multiply Divide node.
Bring that around.
| | 03:54 | I want to make that the output to my Surface Shader.
| | 03:57 | Select the Surface Shader, and Middle-mouse+Drag
Multiply Divide onto that
| | 04:02 | outColor, and you'll see I've got connections here too,
so I want to delete those connections.
| | 04:07 | Let's just make sure I've got what I want;
| | 04:09 | multiplyDivide7.output to engrave surface
shader outColor. Okay, very good!
| | 04:17 | Now we want to make connections from
these remapValue nodes to the Multiply Divide.
| | 04:22 | This is going to be a three-point system here.
| | 04:25 | It's going to have a vector output
because this outColor is a vector.
| | 04:28 | So I need to take three identical copies
of remapValue_v and remapValue_u and
| | 04:34 | plug those into the Multiply Divide inputs.
| | 04:37 | I will right-click and choose outValue.
Go over here to multiplyDivide,
| | 04:42 | left-click and choose input1,
and I want to just connect that to input1 x, y,
| | 04:49 | and z. Do that three times.
| | 04:52 | So right-click and do outValue, input1y,
right-click outValue,
| | 04:59 | left-click input1z.
| | 05:02 | So those three connections are made.
| | 05:04 | Now I want to connect the other side,
so right-click and choose outValue.
| | 05:09 | Go to input2, input2x, outValue,
input2y, and finally right-click
| | 05:19 | outValue and left-click input2z. All right!
| | 05:22 | Now look at that.
| | 05:26 | We are getting crisscrossing, crosshatching there.
Pretty cool!
| | 05:32 | So let's see what that looks like in a rendering.
| | 05:34 | Let me store this one, and do another render.
| | 05:37 | We want to render the correct viewport.
| | 05:39 | So I will select this panel over here and re-render.
| | 05:43 | All right! I've got intersecting lines.
| | 05:45 | So that's with only one branch of our shader tree,
and that's with both branches.
| | 05:50 | Now we can go and adjust our threshold
and kind of get this sort of looking more artistic.
| | 05:57 | So let's do an IPR on this.
| | 05:59 | Click IPR and wait for that to finish.
Drag a big rectangle around everything,
| | 06:04 | go back to the Hypershade. I want to
play around with the Threshold value from
| | 06:08 | this remapValue_v and u. Select the u one;
| | 06:12 | remapValue_u and drag this around until
we kind of get the look that we want. Wow!
| | 06:21 | I don't know about how you feel about it,
but I think that is pretty cool.
| | 06:27 | So if I think that's approximately what I want,
then I will do a full render,
| | 06:31 | and see what it looks like. Okay.
| | 06:33 | Well, we've got an engraving shader.
| | 06:34 | Now the only thing we have left to do
is add a little bit of noise.
| | 06:37 | We'll do that in the final movie of the chapter.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding Brownian noise| 00:00 | We are almost finished with our engraving shader,
but it looks a little bit too regular to me.
| | 00:05 | It needs a little bit of noise and dirt
and grit in it to be believable and artistic.
| | 00:10 | So let's add some noise.
| | 00:11 | I will go ahead and minimize that Render View.
| | 00:15 | In the Hypershade, I want to go to
the 3D Textures section over here,
| | 00:20 | and click on Brownian.
| | 00:21 | The reason I chose Brownian as the noise
source is because it has so few attributes.
| | 00:27 | There is not a lot for us to really worry about.
| | 00:31 | So I want to just tweak these values out a little bit.
| | 00:34 | I already know what values I want
because I played around with this previously.
| | 00:37 | I am going to set Lacunarity down to 3.
| | 00:40 | Lacunarity means how many holes it has. The Increment;
| | 00:44 | that's basically how much contrast it has.
| | 00:47 | So I am going to set that down to 0,
which we're just going to increase the contrast.
| | 00:51 | Octaves, that's how deep the fractal
dimension is, or how many repeats of
| | 00:58 | this algorithm we're going to see. As I increase
the Octaves, it's going to get more detailed.
| | 01:02 | I am actually going to turn that up all the way to 5.
| | 01:06 | Now the other thing I want to do is
there's a place3DTexture node that got
| | 01:10 | created in the same process when I clicked on Brownian.
| | 01:14 | So I just want to scale that up
because it's going to be so small that it
| | 01:18 | won't really have much effect on my scene
because my scene is modeled at real world scale.
| | 01:23 | So I will set the place3DTexture scale
at 50 in all dimensions.
| | 01:28 | That's all there is to that.
| | 01:30 | Then finally I just want to add this
Brownian Noise texture to the
| | 01:34 | plusMinusAverage nodes that I've already got here.
| | 01:38 | So plusMinusAverage doesn't have just only
two inputs, you can have as many as you want.
| | 01:43 | Currently, I've got two inputs.
| | 01:45 | It's accepting an input from the ramp,
and an input from the ideal diffuse.
| | 01:50 | I will also add an input from this Brownian.
| | 01:53 | So I will right-click on the Brownian,
and choose outColor>outColor, and then
| | 01:59 | plusMinusAverage_u, I will go ahead and
choose input3D and I've got a slot open here.
| | 02:06 | So boom! Connect that.
| | 02:07 | Likewise with the other one here.
| | 02:09 | Same thing though, I am going to right-click
and choose outColor>outColor, and
| | 02:13 | then left-click over here and choose
input3D and choose that open slot.
| | 02:19 | Now when I render this here,
it might be a little bit too contrasty.
| | 02:23 | But let's see what happens.
| | 02:24 | I am going to store the image I have.
| | 02:26 | It has no Brownian noise on it,
and then render it with it.
| | 02:29 | You can see that yeah,
we've got too much Brownian noise.
| | 02:32 | It's just sort of blasting out and taking over our rendering.
| | 02:36 | So I will go back into the Hypergraph.
| | 02:39 | What I can do is I can insert a
Remap Value node here in this Brownian.
| | 02:46 | I can delete the connections I've already got,
just select those two wires, and then delete.
| | 02:51 | Then, I just put a Remap Value node in the mix here.
| | 02:55 | Go into Utilities and looking for Remap Value.
| | 03:00 | I just want to dim that Brownian down so it's not so intense.
| | 03:04 | Click on Remap Value, and there it is!
| | 03:06 | I want to take the brownian2 output
and plug it into remapValue in.
| | 03:12 | I will just take one of these, maybe
the alpha is probably the most logical
| | 03:18 | thing to take; right-click on that, and
then left-click on Remap Value, and send
| | 03:23 | the alphaBrownian2 to the inputValue of my Remap Value.
| | 03:28 | Then that Remap Value is going to
go back into these plusMinusAverages.
| | 03:33 | Right-click and choose outColor>outColor,
plusMinus, Input3D>2.
| | 03:40 | Likewise, on the other one, right-click,
outColor>outColor and down here,
| | 03:46 | plusMinus average, Input3D>2. Now I
just want to go to the Remap Value node
| | 03:52 | and adjust these colors.
| | 03:53 | I will leave this one at black, and I
will take the white swatch here and dim
| | 03:58 | that down really low to maybe
a value of let's say 0.2 maybe.
| | 04:04 | So that's just going to create a very subtle noise effect.
| | 04:10 | Okay, do another rendering. Okay.
| | 04:13 | Cool!
| | 04:13 | You can see the noise in here.
| | 04:16 | And if I compare that to the one with
no noise, I think that's a lot better.
| | 04:20 | The strength of the noise is going to
be controlled by this little flag
| | 04:24 | here, this color slot.
| | 04:25 | So if I click on that and change that
color up, if I reduce it down to let's say 0.1,
| | 04:30 | then we won't get as much clipping
and we won't lose as much of these black lines.
| | 04:36 | So let's store that one and do another
render and see the difference.
| | 04:40 | So this is with a value of 1 to that
color slot over here, and that's a value of 2.
| | 04:46 | So I think that's a little bit too much noise.
This one is probably about right.
| | 04:51 | We are getting enough noise that it kind of feels natural.
| | 04:54 | Well, I think that was a great exercise
in learning how to build shader networks
| | 04:58 | because we saw all about all sorts of stuff;
| | 05:01 | remapping, adding, multiplying, reusing nodes,
making connections, hither and thither.
| | 05:09 | I think that was a really good example
of building shader networks in Maya.
| | 05:14 | We've got to learn all about lots and
lots of cool stuff; using material as a
| | 05:19 | texture, adding colors together, remapping
colors, multiplying colors, reusing nodes.
| | 05:28 | So I think that again was quite a
good exercise in learning how to build
| | 05:31 | shader networks in Maya.
| | 05:33 | That's the end of our chapter on
non-photo real rendering and special effects.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
9. Maya ToonAssigning a fill with a ramp shader| 00:00 | In our final chapter we are going to
take quick look at Maya Toon, which is a
| | 00:05 | suite of tools for creating non-photo
real renderings that look like cartoons.
| | 00:11 | It's not like what we did it in the chapter
on special effects where we have to
| | 00:15 | build a big shader network.
| | 00:17 | Maya Toon is a sort of out of the box
set of tools that's good for creating the
| | 00:23 | look of an animated cel cartoon.
| | 00:26 | So I've got a scene here already made and
what I want to do is just select all the objects.
| | 00:31 | I want to assign Maya Toon Fill Shader.
| | 00:35 | This will be found in the Rendering menu set
and there is a menu labeled Toon.
| | 00:42 | You'll see Assign Fill Shader.
| | 00:45 | You have a whole bunch of options here.
| | 00:46 | In fact, all this is going to do is assign a shader
called the Ramp Shader with a certain preset.
| | 00:55 | Let's do Shaded Brightness Three Tone.
| | 00:59 | Go ahead and click on that.
| | 01:00 | The Attribute Editor opens up and
you see I have got some controls here.
| | 01:05 | We can't really see the effect of the
Maya Toon Ramp Shader or Fill Shader here
| | 01:11 | unless we look at it in Viewport 2.0 mode
or do a full rendering.
| | 01:18 | But I can do that here in Viewport by just
swapping the renderer out to Viewport 2.0.
| | 01:25 | Wow! That's pretty cool.
| | 01:27 | Actually, I want to see the lighting in the scene as well.
| | 01:30 | So I want to press the 7 key on my keyboard
and now I can actually see the effect of the lighting.
| | 01:36 | Now I want to go over to my
threeToneBrightnessShader that's been made for me.
| | 01:41 | You can see if I move these swatches
around on this gradient ramp you can see
| | 01:47 | I can control the contrast and brightness.
| | 01:50 | I will just go into each one of these
and I just want to make this a monochrome example.
| | 01:55 | So I am going to bring the saturation down in all of these.
| | 02:04 | So let's say three-quarter brightness
maybe and no saturation.
| | 02:10 | This top one here no saturation,
but not completely bright, because I want
| | 02:15 | a specular highlight in addition to this
diffuse reflection we are seeing here.
| | 02:19 | Of course, I can move these around as well.
| | 02:22 | I could create more of them as well.
| | 02:24 | It's just a standard ordinary ramp.
| | 02:27 | So if I wanted to I could create another
flag on there, another swatch, and give
| | 02:33 | that maybe a dark black color for the deepest shadows.
| | 02:38 | There are other modes as well
you can put this color input into.
| | 02:43 | You can have the colors based upon the
light angle and so on, but I think the
| | 02:47 | brightness is the best choice in this case.
| | 02:52 | So that's the Ramp Shader, just the color aspect of it.
| | 02:57 | We can also give it some specularity.
| | 02:59 | So I can scroll down a bit and you'll
see there's a section for specular shading.
| | 03:04 | I can turn that up and you can see
I am getting some bright highlights here.
| | 03:08 | I can also change the position of this flag here.
| | 03:12 | This swatch, which will control
the size of the specular highlight.
| | 03:16 | Then I've got this graph here, which
controls basically the strength of the
| | 03:21 | highlight, the specular roll off.
| | 03:23 | So I can maybe turn that up all the
way to get a very bright highlight.
| | 03:27 | You can see here that I've got an
interesting situation here where I got
| | 03:32 | specular highlights that are kind of
appearing outside of the realm of the
| | 03:36 | brightest area of the diffuse channel.
| | 03:40 | Basically, to workaround that I just want
to have a bigger spread to that diffuse area.
| | 03:46 | So that spreads out more.
| | 03:50 | Give the specular highlight a chance to shine.
| | 03:55 | I can also, just to help my look here little bit,
I can turn off the specular
| | 04:00 | highlights on some of my lights.
| | 04:02 | I've actually got three lights in the scene
and they're all creating specular hotspots.
| | 04:07 | But I can go into each light and
turn its specular component off.
| | 04:11 | Let's go into the outliner.
| | 04:14 | You see I have got spotlight.
| | 04:16 | I want that one to project specular highlights,
but the point lights, maybe not.
| | 04:21 | So I can select that point light
in the Attribute Editor and disable
| | 04:25 | its specular component.
| | 04:27 | This third one is my backlight.
| | 04:29 | I think I want to keep that one on,
because it looks better with them on.
| | 04:34 | So that's the basics of setting up the Ramp Shader
or as Maya Toon calls it the Fill Shader.
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| Assigning a Toon outline| 00:00 | We've got our ramp Shader
or fill Shader working pretty well.
| | 00:04 | But what we really need to complete this
are some lines on the edges of objects.
| | 00:12 | We need some ink around the edges. as if
it were for a cel shaded drawing.
| | 00:17 | To do that I want to select all the
objects and assign a toon outline.
| | 00:22 | However, these grapes here are very
high polygon count and that's really going
| | 00:26 | to slow down my performance.
| | 00:28 | So I just want to select those grapes
and hide them for the moment, going
| | 00:32 | to Visibility and turn that off,
set that to 0. Then I'm going to
| | 00:38 | select everything except the ground plane,
so I'll just drag a big box surround everything.
| | 00:42 | I don't need an outline on the ground plane,
so I can just Ctrl+Click to deselect that ground plane.
| | 00:48 | With everything else selected I'll go
back into that Rendering menu set in the
| | 00:52 | Toon menu and choose Assign Outline>Add
New Toon Outline, go ahead and click on that.
| | 01:00 | Now I won't be able to see it in
Viewport 2.0. This is a little bit of a
| | 01:05 | paradox here, I can see the ramp
Shader or the fill in Viewport 2.0,
| | 01:11 | but I cannot see the outlines.
| | 01:12 | If I go into a different Render mode
like Default Quality, now I can see the
| | 01:18 | outlines but I can't see the ramp.
| | 01:21 | In fact, there is no display mode currently
where we can see both the fill and the outline.
| | 01:26 | If I go into High Quality, again, I can
see the outline, but I cannot see the fill.
| | 01:32 | In order to see them both at once and
figure out what our look is going to be,
| | 01:37 | we will have to do a full rendering,
so I'll click on the Render button.
| | 01:41 | Additionally by the way,
Interactive Production Rendering doesn't work
| | 01:44 | with the outlines either, so really
the only way to look at this and see it
| | 01:49 | all complete in one image is by doing
a completely full production render
| | 01:54 | or maybe our region render.
| | 01:56 | Okay, so I've got my outlines on there.
Next we will play around with those outline properties.
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| Editing outline attributes in the pfxToon node| 00:00 | We've assigned the outline and now
I want to play around with the outline
| | 00:04 | attributes and control the line width and so on.
| | 00:08 | I'm going to select those outlines,
you can click on it in the Viewport,
| | 00:13 | but it's a little bit difficult to select.
So you'll probably need to go into the outliner,
| | 00:18 | Window>Outliner. What you're looking for
is actually something that says pfxToon1.
| | 00:25 | If you select that, that's the outlines.
| | 00:28 | That's an indicator in fact, that it's the Paint
Effects Engine that's creating these outlines.
| | 00:35 | That's the reason why it doesn't work in
Viewport 2.0, because Viewport 2.0
| | 00:40 | doesn't support Paint Effects.
Additionally, it doesn't work in mental ray
| | 00:46 | unless you convert the outlines to
polygons, which we will do later.
| | 00:50 | But so, if you want to render this
currently in this state, you'll need to
| | 00:53 | render it in Maya Software.
| | 00:55 | I'll hit Ctrl+A to open up my Attributes.
| | 00:57 | Here we've got pfxToon and we can play around
with the most basic things like the Line Width.
| | 01:03 | We can increase that Line Width, you
can see that happening in my Viewport.
| | 01:08 | You see in fact, additionally,
that it's made out of polygons.
| | 01:10 | Now there are different sort of
sections here for different types of lines;
| | 01:17 | Profiles and Creases and Borders and
Intersections. All I am really concerned
| | 01:22 | with here today are the Profiles
around the edges of each object.
| | 01:27 | I can turn the Crease Lines off because
they're not really doing anything anyway.
| | 01:31 | What I want to do in here is just
vary the line width, and I can do that by
| | 01:38 | playing around with this Line End Thinning.
| | 01:41 | If I increase that up, what that's
going to do is, it is going to call the
| | 01:45 | ends of lines to sort of become smaller at the ends.
| | 01:49 | Let's increase the width a bit more,
so we can really see that Line End Thinning.
| | 01:55 | So with the value of 0 you can see
these guys are not really working right.
| | 01:59 | Those are a bit too thick, so I can
reduce their thickness a bit by increasing
| | 02:04 | this Line End Thinning.
| | 02:06 | There are other attitudes in here.
I can go and scroll down and I can play
| | 02:10 | around with the overall width of some
of these, like the Profile Line and the
| | 02:16 | Break Angle that's going to control
how it's going to do the edge detection.
| | 02:21 | Basically, just experiment and play
around until you get the result that you want.
| | 02:28 | One of things you'll need to do pretty
commonly is play around this Line Offset,
| | 02:32 | because that's going to send those
lines towards or away from the surface, so
| | 02:37 | that they will sort of stand out from that surface.
| | 02:42 | Increase that End Thinning, we can
see that a little bit more clearly now
| | 02:46 | here, so that's some of the basic
properties of the Paint Effects Toon.
| | 02:54 | So let's see if we can render that
and see what it looks like, pretty good!
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| Manipulating outlines with a modifier| 00:00 | A cool feature of paint effects is the
ability to change the paint effects based
| | 00:05 | upon something called a Modifier.
| | 00:07 | That is a sphere or cube primitive that
you can position in your scene to change
| | 00:14 | the look of the paint effects just inside that volume.
| | 00:18 | Since the outlines here are based upon
the paint effects engine, we can use a
| | 00:22 | modifier to vary the line width based upon
the position of that Modifier.
| | 00:27 | I want to go ahead and select the lines
and probably the easiest way to do that
| | 00:31 | is from the Outliner.
| | 00:34 | Select the pfxToon node and then in the
Rendering menu set I want to go to the
| | 00:39 | Toon menu and choose Create Modifier.
| | 00:43 | That's created, but it's pretty small.
| | 00:45 | I built my world at real-world scale.
| | 00:48 | So the Modifier is kind of small here. There it is.
| | 00:51 | So I want to scale that up a bit.
Then position it, grab the Move tool, position that up.
| | 01:00 | Let's just focus on what that looks like in the Camera View.
| | 01:05 | So I'll tab the spacebar.
| | 01:08 | As I move that modifier around, you can
see that it's changing the line width.
| | 01:12 | Anything that's inside that sphere is getting a thicker line.
| | 01:18 | That's pretty cool.
| | 01:19 | What I really want to do is actually
make the line thinner, not thicker.
| | 01:23 | So I'll go into the Modifier Attributes,
hit Ctrl+A, to get the Attributes up.
| | 01:28 | The relevant attribute here is the Width Scale.
| | 01:31 | That's a multiplier for the width of the line.
| | 01:34 | Currently, it's set to the value of 5,
which means that inside the sphere's
| | 01:38 | volume the line will be five times thicker than elsewhere.
| | 01:43 | What I want is for it to be thinner, of course.
| | 01:45 | So I want this to be a fractional value.
| | 01:48 | If I bring this down to let's say .5 or so,
you can see that in this area the line is thinner.
| | 01:55 | So we can play around with that position.
| | 02:02 | In order to get the best out of this, maybe I can
go back into the actual paint effects node.
| | 02:09 | If you can't select it in the Viewport again,
go into the Outliner and select it there.
| | 02:13 | Select that Paint Effects node and I can
increase the overall line width to
| | 02:18 | compensate for the fact that I've thinned
the line down over in this area. Cool!
| | 02:23 | So let's render that and see
what it looks like. Very nice!
| | 02:26 | So my lines are much thicker here in the
foreground and much thinner here in the
| | 02:30 | background, which is a result I was trying to achieve.
| | 02:33 | That's how you can use a Modifier to vary
the Line Width of your pfxToon outline.
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| Converting Toon outlines to polygons| 00:00 | We've got our fill and our outline
for Maya Toon working pretty well.
| | 00:05 | This will render in Maya Software just fine.
| | 00:08 | If I go ahead and go to the Render Settings,
you see I've got Maya Software as a
| | 00:12 | current renderer at Production quality.
| | 00:13 | If I do render of that, it looks fine.
| | 00:17 | I can go ahead and store that image.
| | 00:19 | What I want to do is I want to also render
it in other Renderers like mental ray
| | 00:25 | or Maya Hardware 2.0.
| | 00:26 | It's actually going to be the best choice here.
| | 00:29 | So if I change my renderer to Maya
Hardware 2.0 and then do a renderer of
| | 00:34 | that we'll see that we don't see the
outlines, because Hardware 2.0 doesn't
| | 00:39 | support paint effects.
| | 00:41 | While I am at it by the way I'll go
into the Mata Hardware 2.0 tab in my
| | 00:45 | Renderer Settings and just increase
the Quality, because it's looking a bit
| | 00:48 | jagged and aliased go into Multisample Anti-aliasing.
| | 00:51 | Turn that on and turn the Sample Count
up all the way, do another render.
| | 00:56 | That's just going to soften up all those jagged edges.
| | 00:59 | So that's what it looks like with
Maya Hardware 2.0 and with no outlines.
| | 01:04 | If we want our outlines what we'll do is
select them and convert them to polygons.
| | 01:09 | I'm going to my Outliner, select the
pfxToon node, and then go into the Modify
| | 01:18 | menu, Convert>Paint Effects to Polygons.
| | 01:22 | Let's go into the Options just quickly.
| | 01:25 | There is a limit to the number of polygons here.
Actually the default is a 100,000.
| | 01:32 | When you convert you can just set an upper
limit so that you don't overload your system.
| | 01:37 | Go ahead and click Convert and now
I can tell that it's been converted to
| | 01:42 | polygons, because in fact I'm seeing triangles here.
| | 01:45 | So that's a dead giveaway.
| | 01:47 | Now as long as I don't delete construction
history I am fine and I can actually
| | 01:51 | continue to make changes to this.
| | 01:53 | For example, I can select my Line Modifier,
and move that around and it's still
| | 01:58 | going to affect the Paint Effects in
the exact same way they did before.
| | 02:01 | We might have a little bit of a performance hit
from the polygon conversion,
| | 02:06 | because that needs to be updated here in real time.
| | 02:08 | But essentially nothing has changed.
| | 02:11 | It's just that the Paint Effects
have been converted to polygons, but the
| | 02:15 | original Paint Effects Outline node is still there in the scene.
| | 02:19 | So now if I render this with Maya
Hardware 2.0 we've got our Outlines.
| | 02:24 | But did you notice how fast that was, by the way?
| | 02:27 | So Maya Hardware 2.0 is going to be much,
much, much faster than Maya Software.
| | 02:33 | I mean at least ten times faster,
maybe even one hundred times faster.
| | 02:38 | That's a big deal if you're in production
and you need to render thousands of frames.
| | 02:42 | Maya Hardware 2.0 is an excellent choice
for something like Maya Toon.
| | 02:48 | Now if we look at our software rendered version
you'll notice that they don't look the same.
| | 02:52 | That's the Maya Software version and
I move my slider over here and that's the
| | 02:57 | Maya Hardware 2.0 version.
| | 02:59 | You just basically need to choose your
renderer first before you make a lot of
| | 03:05 | art decisions to get the look right.
| | 03:07 | You just need to choose which renderer
you're going to use. Then stick with
| | 03:11 | that as you continue to make changes such as
changes to the ramp or to the line properties.
| | 03:17 | So that's the basic introduction to Maya Toon
and using that with Maya Hardware 2.0.
| | 03:22 | That's the end of our chapter on Maya Toon,
and actually that's the end
| | 03:28 | of our course on Creating Shader Networks in Maya.
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ConclusionGoodbye| 00:00 | That wraps up our course in Creating
Shader Networks in Maya and mental ray.
| | 00:05 | As we've seen, Maya provides a
comprehensive set of tools for nearly infinite
| | 00:09 | customization of materials and maps.
| | 00:12 | That's a major reason why Maya has
been almost universally adopted for 3D
| | 00:16 | digital content creation in the
media and entertainment industries.
| | 00:20 | With the knowledge demonstrated in this course,
a talented artist or designer can
| | 00:24 | achieve almost any desired shading effect.
| | 00:27 | I hope this course has provided you with the skills
you need to create a wide variety of materials.
| | 00:32 | Thanks for watching and goodbye.
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