I love it when I have a really productive week where I get something done every night, in addition to the exercise bit. I’ve had a couple of weeks in a row of that and it’s felt really good. This week started out like it was going to go that way. And then I got kicked in the head by Mother Nature. A few times. Allergy season seems to have started early. The poor trees and plants must be so confused. I know my allergies are. And unfortunately, nothing I took was helping. I’m finally getting enough relief that I can function again so hopefully I can get back on track.
I found a tutorial on materials in Maya. It’s called Maya Shading and Texturing Fundamentals. So it starts pretty basic. Which is good. And the author is pretty thorough. He’s been pretty good about covering different ways to do things. So if there are 3 ways
to apply a texture or create one or sort them, then he covers all three. I’ve got about 1.5 hours of segments to watch and given what I’ve learned so far I expect to learn even more cool stuff.
I was going to watch the rest of the tutorial before starting on some of the texturing I need to do. However, I realized that I had enough information to do what I want to do at the moment. So I took a break from the lessons and started playing with the Worm Guy.
The rigging tutorial indicated it might be better to have the textures or materials applied before doing the rig. So texturing it is.
One of the things that you can do with Maya is setup textures in the Hypershade and then once you select what you want to apply a texture to you can use the right-click menu and apply the texture from there instead of going back and forth between the Hypershade and the view port. So that’s what I did. I set up the textures and then selected my bits and applied them. I’ve had the colors for the Worm Guy in mind for a while so it was easy to set things up. There was very little fussing to be done. Though there were a couple of areas that I wasn’t sure about. The lips and the eye color. I chose a really dark blue for the eyes. For the lips I started out with a green but it looked weird so I decided a yellow-ish orange-ish color made more sense. And looks better.
I need to add some lighting I think. The default lights don’t really show the color well. A
couple of scene lights could help that a lot. This lighting issue shows in the test renders. I also found in the test renders that the geometry isn’t showing as smooth as I would like. I can’t tell yet if I’m doing something wrong or just haven’t found the right setting or if I’m not rendering correctly. If I would watch one of the longer tutorials where they do a big project I might learn that. Hmm. I might also learn about using the Arnold renderer. Hmm. Hmm.
For now I used what smoothing I could find and found a setting that is better. It’s not as nice as I would like. But it’s getting there. I haven’t done much with the render settings so there may be some things in there that will help. I did try the different renderer options. That was interesting. Arnold just rendered a black scene. I think I might need lights for that renderer, or a camera. Not sure yet. Oh, but I found one that is a Maya vector renderer. That was really cool. It not only looks cool. It gives me a whole other way to consider rendering my scenes. What do you think? I like the Worm Guy rendered in vector art.
That was the excitement of the week. At least the good stuff. There was some over-run from the day job into my weekend but that’s ok. It’s just part of it. And at least it wasn’t something that felt like a waste of time, like a meeting. There might be a little over-run a day or two this week. But with some luck it won’t be too bad. I should be able to get some lights in the scene for the Worm Guy. If I get real ambitious, and don’t get sidelined by allergies, I might get the rig started for him. I’ve also got a Penguin that needs textures. I already added lights for that one. And no rig needed for now. So some nice textures and a background maybe and I should have the Penguin all ready. And of course there is the next model to start on. Lots to look forward too. It will be interesting to see, what, and, how much, gets done.