Introduction to Maya 2013

Let's begin by taking a look at how we can start to add simple materials to our objects. So here is the ship that we built, in the modeling stage. So right now, it's just a flat, gray color. OK, so we need to start to define the look of some of the different surfaces on here. And we can do that using materials. And so to access our materials, we're going to go up to Window, Rendering Editors, and let's go into the Hypershade. So it's going to open up the Hypershade, here. And you can see that we have, kind of, a listing, over here, on the left. And then we have these, sort of, balls, over here. Some of these are associated with some of the imported data. But the material that is on our ship-- if we take a look at this, we right click on the swatch, here, or click on the swatch, and then right click. And I can say, Select Objects in Initial Shading Group. And you can see that it's now selected to ship. So we can tell that everything is associated with this default Lambert shader. The spheres are there to give you an indication of how that's going to look with the shading, so with the highlight and with the shadowing. So you get kind of a 3D effect here. You can see how some of these look a little bit different. So in order to add a material, we need to, first, create a new material. And we have options over here. We have different kinds of materials. We have Maya materials. And then we also have mental ray materials. Now, if you're not seeing your mental ray materials, you may have to go in, and under the Plug-in Manager, just go in and make sure that your Maya to mental ray is loaded up, and other different kinds of materials that we can create. All right, so the basic materials you're going to have available are, Lambert, which you can see here. So go ahead and drop a new Lambert in. There's also Fong and blin are kind of the three main stays. And you can kind of see the default look of those. So here's our Fong, here's our blin. The difference is sort of in the specularity, which is the highlight you see here. OK, the Lambert, you're not going to get any specularity, so it's going to be really matte, flat surface. The Fong, think of it a little bit more like a, kind of, a plastic, or shiny plastic. And then the blin, maybe or something more like metal. Although, there's obviously things that you can do to change all of these. OK so the first thing we'll do is select the particular kind of material we want to add. And we'll use one of these basic ones. So let's go ahead and add a blin. We can select our object here to add it. So if we select, let's say, one of these fins we can right click on this, and say, Assign Material To Selection. Now, we can't really see much that's happened, except the highlight. So let's change the color. We'll double click on the material to bring up its attributes. And then you can see, in the Common Material Attributes, there are all of these attributes that we can change. At the very top you'll see one for color. We can dial this slider from black to white, change the value of it, or we can change the actual color. So let's make it red, for now, so we can see it. So we'll change it to red, and you can see that that fin updates. OK so now we have this red fin that's a little bit shiny, based on the specularity. We can also go ahead and middle-mouse drag from the material into our scene, onto the object. So we can add to that fin. And we can come in here, and add it to this fin. And now we've got those objects associated with this particular material. We can name the materials. Double clicking, we can go ahead and bring this up, and call this Fins Blin. So we understand what it is. We can also change the specularity of it. So coming down here, under Specular Shading, you can see we can change the specular color. So you see where that highlight is? We can make that darker. And you get a good preview what it looks like on our little swatch, here. I can take the roll off down, which will reduce the aspecular amount. I can tighten up the spec by changing the eccentricity. so we can make something that really has a tight spec, so something that's glossier, if you want to do that. Or we can make something that is more of a spread out specular look, which maybe is a little bit more of, kind of, like a metal. and then you have other settings for reflectivity, and so forth. You could always go in and select your object. And the Attributes, you'll see that it has now the material listed. So it's associated with that particular piece. Then, at any time, we can come in, and we can change our color. So let's, maybe, give it a little bit of green. And we can desaturate it, make it a lot darker. So it's almost kind of a gray with a little bit of green in it. If that's a little bit too green, maybe, we can go ahead and take some of that green out, darken it up so it's almost black. So play around with new materials. If you want to try to use a Fong, you can do that, as well. You'll have a few different options in here, as far as the way the specular is calculated. You can see, instead of the settings that we had in the blin, we have here, Cosine Power and Specular Color are all we have for this one. All right, so to add materials, and to work with materials, you want to use the Hypershade. Now, with this Fins Blin selected, this is the area, up at the top, where we're going to have all of our materials listed. Down at the bottom is, sort of, our work area. And so if we want to take a look at this in detail, we can go ahead and map the input and output connections down here. And it'll show us-- and we can just move around, just as we would in a view port-- it'll show us our material node. And the way that Maya works with these, and works with anything, really, is with nodes. So you have this material node, and it's connected into this shader. And you start connecting things into this, you can start to get more complex material setups and more complex shaders. You can do that with any of these. Map these down here, and you can see that you can start to work with these. Now, in Maya 2013, there's also a Node Editor that you can access. So you can go into, under Window Node Editor, and here, if I want to create a material, I can just right click, and say Create Node. And then I can bring in a material. So let's create a blin here. And so I can go ahead and access my blin, and it looks a little bit different. I can go ahead and open up the blin. I can open it up all the way. And you can see all the inputs and outputs that we have here. So with this, you have a lot more control over visually, kind of, connecting things up. So it's just a little bit different way to work, versus working here, in the Hypershade. You can really create some complex connections in here, that's maybe a little bit easier, than you would, come in here to do. But you can do much the same thing that you can in the Hypershade. So Hypershade is where we're going to see this. I can zoom in and make this larger or smaller. I can do the same thing here for these swatches. And then you also have your textures, utilities, and so forth. But we're really going to concentrate on materials, here. So just remember you can right click to add, or you can drag it onto your objects. So the next thing we want to look at is, how we can start to modulate the color. So we've created a material that is one color, this one black color. We can modulate the specularity, but what happens if we want to change the color over the surface of our model? Well, let's take a look at how we can use, something called, ramps, to do that. So we'll take a look at that in the next lesson.