Introduction to Maya 2013

In this lesson, let's take a look at how we can start to add multiple materials to single polygon objects. So in some cases, we may have objects that we want to start to add different materials to. So let's say we have these thrusters. So the outer part of the thrusters, we want to be kind of a black metal. So let's go ahead and create a new blend. And we'll call this thruster metal blend. And let's go ahead and make it black. And we can modify the Spec a little bit. I'm going to kind of widen it up a bit. OK. It's just a simple material. And we'll go ahead and assign material. And on these thrusters, I'll just combine those into one piece. OK. Let's actually go ahead and isolate this. All right. So let's say that we want to have sort of a glow coming from inside of the thrusters. So it's not just black. Well, a good material to do that is a Surface Shader. A Surface Shader isn't going to have any of this shading on it. It's going to be strictly diffuse color. So let's go ahead and Create, Material. And let's create a Surface Shader. So you can see right here it's just completely black. If I were to change the color to something like a red, you can see that actually it's just bright, bright red. OK? So let's go ahead and take a look at how we can start to add this to pieces of our mesh. So rather than adding materials to specific objects, you can also add them to polygon selections. So if we come in here-- and let's select these polygons. And I'm going to deselect anything that I've selected on the back here. So I've just got this polygon selection inside here. I'm going to hit Shift and then period. So it's basically the greater than sign. And I'm going to go ahead and hit that a couple of times to grow the selection till we've got something like this. Now with these polygons selected, I can now right click on the Surface Shader, say Assign Material to Selection. So this is going to retain the black. And if I go to default, you can see that a little bit better. But now we've got this glowing or this red material inside here. So if we do an IPR of this, you can see it's actually gray in here. That's just because that piece is sticking through it. So I want to take this piece and just move it back a little bit. There we go. So now we've got this black piece with this red inside. We can actually also come into our Surface Shader, and we can change the glow. So if we were to add a little bit of glow, just bringing this up a little bit, you can see I can actually add a bit of a glow to this. OK. Here's without. Here's with just adding a little bit of gray glow. And we can change this color. So if we wanted to add something with a little bit more color. Wow, that really, really makes a nice, strong glow there. So that would be maybe a full blast. These thrusters are working. OK. We can dial that down a little bit to dial it back. OK. And so maybe at rest, it's just kind of got a subtle glow to it. But you can add that within your Surface Shader. OK. So we could come in on these other pieces and do the same thing. Let's move this back a little bit more. Here we go. And then on these pieces, let's do the same. So I'm going to go ahead and select those faces, Shift select those. And then I want to go in and deselect anything that I've selected on the back end. Let's grow our selection. And right click to add to our selection. And let's go ahead and turn off our Isolate Selected. And then we can come in here and again do a nice IPR. And you can see we've got a little glow there. OK. We might want to dial that down a little bit so that it's not so much. But you can add that in if you want to. Remember, if you really want a nice, strong glow, you can add something a bit brighter. OK? If you're going at full speed, those thrusters are firing, you may want a nice, strong glow to it. OK? We'll add something a little bit more subtle. I actually like something like that. OK? And so we still have the black material on there. And you can kind of see that that black is actually a bit reflective. And so to bring that down-- you kind of see that in there? To bring that reflectivity down, you just go into your black blend material. And under Reflectivity, you just want to take that down. And so you can see how that reflection is starting to go away. You get something a little bit less reflective. OK? So experiment with that. And you can experiment on these thrusters or any of the other pieces. If you want to use maybe this piece to add a little bit of detail to some of these inner areas, just assigning different materials, you could certainly do that. All right. That's how we can add multiple materials to single objects in Maya. The next thing that I want to talk about is something that's important when we're talking about texturing. And that is UVs. OK? UVs are very important, especially for polygons, in how the textures are applied. So we'll talk a little bit about that in the next lesson.