Procedural Texturing in Maya and V-Ray

In this lesson, we will be creating the shader for the cell membrane. But I won't be going into details on how to create this as I did for the nucleus, because I'm going to be using the same techniques that I did to create the nucleus shader. So before we start creating the shader, let's first go ahead and hide the cell membrane, because, you remember, we hid that when we started working on the nucleus shader. So to do that, go to Window, Outliner. And make sure you have Show All. And under the group, The Cell, you have Cell Membrane. Just go ahead in the Channel box and, in the Visibility slot, just type in 1. This will un-hide the cell membrane. Now let's head into Hypershade and start working on the shader. Again, move your mouse over the work area. Just wait a minute to-- move your mouse over the work area and just press Space, so the hypershade fills the entire view port. For the cell membrane, I'm going to be using a simple V-Ray material. I'm going to go ahead and name this "membrane color." Double-click on it to open the Attribute Editor. For the diffuse color, I'm going to be using a leather node. So let's go ahead and create the leather node. Next to the slider, press on the small checker. This will open up the Create Render node. Under 3D Textures, just select Leather. This will link Leather into the Diffuse slot. Now I'll go ahead and just do a couple of tweaks to this. For the cell color, I'm going for the light blue, the saturated light blue more on the purple side. And for the crease color, I'm going for a darker blue. Again, feel free to use any colors that work for your project. I'm going to go ahead and make the cell size a bit bigger, tweak the spottiness a bit, add some randomness to this, and play around with the threshold a bit. For the bump map, I'm going to be using another leather. But before I do that, I'm going to go ahead and name the leather node that we created. Hold Control. Double-click on the leather node, and name this "membrane diffuse." Now, on the 3D Textures, let's go ahead and create another leather node. And I'm going to go ahead and name this 'bump membrane." For the bump membrane, I'm going to be using black and white colors, just so it works as we have a clear bump map. So for the cell color, I'm going for a white color or maybe a light gray. And for the crease color, I'm going for a dark gray. I'm going to go ahead and tweak these settings for a bit. For the cell side, I'm going to go and resize this up a bit to maybe around 8. I'm going to turn down the density of it, just so I can get this spottiness look. Again, the easiest way to check out the changes that you do, just select the node that you created and press F. This will focus on the shader, so we can see all the changes that we're doing. For the spottiness, I'm going to add some spottiness to this, just will add some more differences between the color. And we have more gray ones and white ones. And for the randomness, tweak that a bit. And just turn down the threshold, just so we can get a nice fall-off for the spots. Now, once we're happy with the result-- again, feel free to create the look that you're going for-- click on the membrane color. And let's drop this into the Bump slot. Just scroll down a bit, until we get to the Bump and Normal mapping. Now we'll click and drag this over the map. As you can see, this will add the bump map to the membrane color. Although this is too harsh, I'm going for a subtle look, just something so it has some type of texture to it. So I'm going to tone down the Bump Multiplier something around 0.20. So you see we do have some bump map, but nothing that strong. Now I'm going to go ahead and add this to the cell membrane. So let's select the cell membrane. Go open Hypershade. Right-click, and "assign material to selection." And if we open the Render view and do a test render, see how this looks. All right, as you can see, this is the color that we added. And we can see that this has a bump to it. But this is not the look that I'm going for. I'm going for a more transparent book, just so we can see the nucleus inside of it. I spent so many hours working on that, so we have to make this look interesting. So for that, I'm going to add some transparency. But I'm not looking for a uniform transparency to this one. In the middle of it, I want this to be more transparent and to be less transparent, once we get to the edges. And for that, we are going to use a ramp with a sample info linked to it, with the facing ratio linked to the coordinates. So for that, I'm going to go and create, under the 2D Textures, create a ramp node. I'm going to go ahead and name this "Opacity Ramp." For the colors, I'm going to go and use two colors. For the top one, I'm going with the dark gray. And for the bottom one, I'm going for white. So as I said, transparency to less transparent. Again, we will be tweaking this to get the look that we are going for. Now, once we have that done, go ahead, under Utilities, and select Sample Info. And now, let's drop the sample info over, middle-click, and drag it over the opacity. Select Other. And in the Connection Editor, on the left side, select Facing Ratio. On the right side, under the Opacity Ramp, select uChord and vChord Now close this. Now let's go ahead and drop the Opacity Ramp under the-- just one second, scroll up a bit-- under the Opacity Map. And if we focus on the swatch, we can see that, as I said, this is the start of the effect that I was going for, to have the middle, the core of it, be more transparent and less transparent when we go to the edges. So if we do a test render now, keep this for comparison and do a test render now, this is exactly the look that I'm going for. So we have an outer blue, and we can see the nucleus. And now we can tweak this to get the exact look that we're going for. So if we go back to the Opacity Ramp and just tweak this a bit, you see, if we focus on this one, you see, as we move the ramp down, you see the middle area becomes more transparent. So it really depends for the look that you're going for. All right. So now, although this is looking really good now, I want to add some more texture and more shape to the cell membrane. And to do that, I'm going to add another shader into the bump map that we created, the leather one. So to do that, I'm going to go ahead and create another ramp. As you can see, the ramp is, probably, the most used node for the procedural texturing. For this one, I'm going to use a V-Ramp. And I'm going to make sure the interpolation is set to "none." What I'm going for is the same exact style of vines that I used on the nucleus and in the bump and on the nucleus diffuse color. Again, because this is a bump, I'm going to go with darker grays and white and light gray, and drag to duplicate a color, and move these. So again, feel free to move these and make them as thick or as small as you want, just to get the look. And we can always get back and tweak this, to get the look they we're going for. I'm going to name these "membrane vines," all right? Now I'm going to go ahead and add some V-Wave Because this is a V-Ramp, I'm going to go ahead and add some V-Wave to it. And again, I'm going to go ahead and break these waves using some noise, just to get some nice organic look to this one. Again, feel free to add the effect that works for your project. Now let's drop this into the bump membrane. And I'm going to go ahead and drop this into the crease color. So if we focus on this one, you can see we do have the leather and those spots. And now, on top of it, we have these lovely vines, just to add some nice texture to the bump map. And now, if we go ahead and do a test render, we can barely see this effect, which is added here. But as I said, once we're going to start adding some lights to this and we add some reflectiveness to the material and we add some lights, as I said, then we're going to add an image baselining. We're going to get some nice reflections on the cell membrane. All right, I want to add some more texture to the cell membrane. And for that, I'm going to be using the same shader that we used for the nucleus, which is the V-Ray blend material, just to make this more interesting and just to give it a look that it has a couple of more layers. So to do that, I'm going to name this "membrane blend." Click to open it in the Attribute Editor. And I'm going to middle-click and drag the membrane color into the base material. Now, for the coat material, I'm going to be using a shader that I already went ahead and created, which is the "membrane coat." Now I'm going to open up this shader and go over the inputs and outputs to this one. I used exactly the same techniques that I used to create the membrane color. So I'm going to go ahead and explain each shader that I linked into this one. So for the membrane coat, I used, for the opacity map, I used a ramp. Again, you see a simple ramp, no noise to it, no nothing, exactly as I did for the membrane color. For the bump color, I went ahead and used another ramp. But this time, I used a ramp with some wave to it and some noise, again, exactly the same thing. Now, for the color, diffuse color, I went ahead and used a coat material, a ramp shader. And for this one, I went with a pink color and a bluish color. And as you see, no noise to it, no nothing. Just simple, so I can get a nice pink into the middle and blue outside, but just by using and adding this sample info and linking the facing ratio to the u- and vChords. Now I'll go ahead and select the membrane blend, the blend material that we just created, and drag and drop the membrane coat. And I'm going to go ahead and drag and drop this into the coat0. Now, before we do a render, I'm going to go ahead and apply this material, the membrane blend, to the cell membrane. Go back into the-- sorry. Just go back into the Hypershader. Right-click and-- no. All right, right-click and assign material to selection. All right, save this for comparison. And now, if we do a render-- as I said, I'm going to use this just to add some more texture on top of the membrane color that we just created. So as you can see, this is what I was telling you about. This is the pink color and the outside blue. And we see this one has a more nice bump effect to it. And now we can see the bump that this membrane color has to offer. Although this is looking good and this is the effect that I'm looking for, just one thing that I really don't like is that the bump of the coat membrane is just overlapping with the nucleus. And I really don't want that. I want the nucleus to be really clear and nothing coming over it. So to fix that, we go back into the Hypershader and select the opacity ramp that we used for the membrane color. And I'm going to go ahead and drag and drop this into the blend amount of the coat material, just to get that exact look of more opacity in the middle, like 100% opacity in the middle or almost 100%, because we're using the gray, and less transparency on the edges. Now, if we do a test render, this is exactly what I was talking about. So we can see the difference is you can see that the nucleus is not clear. And we cannot see the nucleus. So we're just adding that opacity. We still have a nice color and the nice texture, but without overlapping the nucleus. In the next lesson, we'll go ahead and create the villi, those hairy tentacles used--