Procedural Texturing in Maya and V-Ray

In this lesson, we will be modeling to cell that we are going to use in our final image. But before we start, I want to go over some reference materials, just so we can understand the anatomy of a cell. So I went ahead and Googled the word cell and, as you can see, we do have a variety of shapes and colors. But when you start looking at these images, you're going to start noticing that all of them-- they do have a couple of things in common. If you check out this image, you're going to see that a couple of Maya elements stand out, which is the outer shell, which is called the cell membrane, and the interior one, which is the nucleus. For this lesson, I'll be modeling the outer shell of the cell membrane and the nucleus. Feel free to model the small elements as well that sit into the cell membrane, but I'm going to be using procedural texturing to add these [INAUDIBLE] effects, the nice effect, on top of the nucleus and the cell membrane. On top of that, we will be modeling what is called the pili. And to see a better example of the pili, we're going to check out this image below here. And the pili are these hairy tentacles that sit on the cell membrane. And we are going to create this using VRayFur. So let's head over into Maya. I'm going to start with the modeling the nucleus. And for that I'm going to use a NURBS primitive. I'm going to start with a simple sphere. I'm using NURBS primitive because it's far much easier to get an organical-looking shape rather than using polygons. But feel free to use polygons. This won't affect in any way the result of the final image. It's just a matter of preference. So, as I said, I'm going to start with a simple sphere. I'm going to go ahead and do a couple of simple modifications to this one so we don't have this perfect sphere, because nothing in nature is this perfect. So to do that, I'm going to just go right ahead and right-click. Select whole. Go and select the top edges of the whole. Just let me get the top one. I'm going to go ahead and-- we've got this side one, as well. Select the top ones. I'm going to go ahead and scale these down. Maybe move them up a bit. Select this. Move that down. Scale down that a bit. Rotate it. I'm going for a seed, plum-looking nucleus. But feel free to create whatever shape you think looks good or fits your project. Because, as you can see from the reference materials, we do have a very big variety of shapes and colors. We do have square ones, cylinder, pill-looking ones, square, as I said. So feel free to create the shape that fits your project. I'm going to check out this nucleus from multiple angles just to make sure it looks good from all sides. I'm going to do just a couple of small tweaks. Once I'm happy with that, I'm going to go ahead and create the outer cell, which is the outer shell, which is the cell membrane. For that I'm going to be using a sphere, a NURBS primitive, as well. So we're going to go NURBS primitive, sphere. And we just press four if you want to see it. Now, we're just going to scale this out so we have the nucleus sitting inside of it. Again, I'm going to go back to the reference materials. You're going to see that the nucleus sits inside the cell membrane. Again, for this one I'm going to do a couple of the small tweaks, just so I don't get this perfect-looking sphere. For this one I'm not going to add that many changes because I do want this to look more spherical than the nucleus. Just so we can have a nice contrast between the two shapes. So, once you're happy with the shape of this one, we can go ahead and start shading this. So, in the next lesson we'll start shading, creating the shader for the cell nucleus using procedural texturing and V-Ray Shaders.