Maya Tutorials Chapter 8

I know I haven't really been organizing these by chapter til just now, but I figured that this is a better way to organize it so that I am not making a ton of posts. Also, this helps to consolidate my work in a better way than putting them up individually.

This section mostly had to do with materials and learning how to apply them to objects and manipulate them. Throughout the exercises, I mostly used the cloth material on my objects.

In this material here, you can see that I did a couple of things to it. I applied the cloth material to this sphere object, Then I went in and I changed the color of the two different weaves, then I changed the width of them and the distance between them, and changed how much they curved as well. After doing this, I then added a checkered material to the transparency setting.








This is a render of multiple different materials. from left to right they are anisotropic, Blinn, Lambert, Phong, and PhongE. These materials are good for representing different things. The difference in these is how light is rendered on the object and how it is reflected and such. As you can see they each have noticeable differences in the way that the light reflects off their surfaces.






Here is an example of a Ramp Shader. What this does is allows you to have different colors at different points on your material. This is the same kind of idea as a car with two tone, or an oil spill, where the oil is a different color where it is being hit with more light. Its a handy material for making some really unique and interesting designs.









In this screen capture, you can see that there is an image displayed on a planar object. This is just to show that you can use an image file as a material as well, and you can use any of the five basic materials that I named above to do it, and its lighting affects will also still take place. basically the image just replaces the solid color.








Here are two images, one is a sphere with a bump mapping material assigned to it, and the other is a render of a sphere with a displacement material affect on it. The difference is, bump mapping doesn't actually change the shape of the object, but does change the shape of how the lighting affects it. The other actually changes the shape of the model geometrically when it renders it.



And here is my favorite one so far. This is a render using the Mental Ray renderer. All of the materials that have been applied to the objects are specifically from Mental Ray's box of tools. From left to right they are car paint, glass material, and skin. These are just a few of Mental Ray's materials, and they look stinking great.