Procedural Texturing in Maya and V-Ray

In this lesson we will be adding the hairy looking tentacles, also called the pilli on the surface of the cell membrane. And for that we're going to be using V-Ray fur. To add V-Ray fur to the cell membrane, first of all select the cell membrane nerve sphere, go to Create V-Ray, and V-Ray fur. Add V-Ray fur to selection, just click on that. As you can see, nothing happened. But if we look into the channel box under the outputs, you see that we have a V-Ray fur properties linked into the cell membrane shape. But we don't see any fur in the view port. Well, if we go back to create V-Ray and V-Ray fur, we will see that it says add V-Ray fur to selection, bu it also says works for meshes only. What this means is that the V-Ray fur doesn't work with surfaces, so it works only with polygon meshes. So we can't add V-Ray fur to nerves or subdivisions. All right, so how do we add V-Ray fur to nerves? Well, we go ahead and convert the nerve sphere into a polygon mesh, and to do that we go to select the sphere, go to modify, convert, and nerves to polygon. Just go ahead and click on the small option box, just to open up the convert the convert to nerves polygon options, and just make sure you have control point selected. What it will do is it will convert this into a polygon, but it will add edges only where we have the control points of the nerve sphere. Go ahead and click tesselate, and this is what we get. Press five on your keyboard, and now if we press three to smooth this, we're going to see it looks exactly, go back to four, and it looks exactly as the nerve sphere. As you can notice, it didn't believe the nerve sphere, which is good because we just want this to sit on the top of the cell membrane and just hold the pilli, the V-Ray fur. And we're going to be adding a new material to this one, to the surface of polygon mesh that we created, and we're going to go ahead and rename this pilli mesh. Now let's open up [INAUDIBLE] shape and add the pilli shader to the pilli mesh. For the pilli shader, I went ahead and created the pilli shader for this one. Again, for the pilli shader, I used exactly the same techniques that I used to create the shader for the nucleus and the cell membrane. So is there is no reason to go ahead and explain that again. But I'm going to go ahead and show you the inputs and outputs to this shader. For this one I used a V-Ray light shader, simple V-Ray light shader. As you can see, this is V-ray light material. And into the color, I went ahead and linked a ramp. Again, a ramp, u-ramp. For this one I added two colors, a really hot pink and a really desaturated dark purple. As you can see, we don't have any wave to this or any noise. And for the opacity, and you can see this is really, we can barely see it, but we can see it on the edges more, and in the middle is far much more transparent. And we did that by linking, again, the sample info into another ramp, which we used for the opacity. And for this one I went with the black and a darker gray, just to get that look that I'm going for. One thing you will not notice is that these two ramps share the same sampler info. Well, the sampler info does the same thing for the both of them. So you can go ahead and use the same sampler info for all the ramps that if the settings are exactly the same. So if this sample info is linked to the UNV cord, and this one as well is linked to the UNV cord, so this is just to make things a bit more cleaner, and we don't have that much clutter in the work area. Now let's go ahead and select the pilli surface. Just make sure you have the bully pilli mesh, so make sure it's a pilli mesh. Right click on the pilli and assign material to selection. Now before we add the V-Ray fur to this one, I'm just going to go ahead and add some smoothing, some smooth modifier to this one. Because if we go ahead now and just do a render, this is the look that we're going to get. You can see we can barely see the edges of the pink color, and we will use that to give a nice color of pink, of glowing pink to the tentacles, which we're going to use in post to add some nice glowing effects to the pilli. So before I add the V-Ray fur to this one, I'm going to add some smooth. Well, why I'm going ahead and adding some smooth is because I need the V-Ray fur to be distributed along the faces. And now if we look at this one, we see that we have very few faces on this polygon mesh. So I really want to have a lot of faces because if we're going to distribute like three hairs per face, it's not really the look that I'm going for. So to do that, we go to mesh, smooth, and this adds more faces to the mesh. But I'm going to go into the inputs where it says poly smooth face, and I'm going to go ahead and add three. Just make this more smooth and add a lot of face to this. All right, now we select the pilli mesh, go to create V-Ray, V-Ray fur, add V-Ray fur to selection. And as you can see, now that's a lot of hair. And now if you go ahead and do a test render, and all right, I'm not getting the result that I wanted, so let me check out the perspective. Yeah. We're Still getting the perspective. Just zoom out, and I'm going to do another render again. Sorry about that. I think it's because we have too much hair and the size is too big. So we're going to go ahead and just tweak this, just to make it, because if we zoom out, you see this is really, that's a lot of hair. That's really, really huge. So if we go ahead and just escape, so we close the renderer, select this, open the attribute editor, and under the, you can see pilli, mesh, V-Ray fur properties, I'm just going to tone down the lengths. Something more manageable, maybe something like that. And if we do a test render now, the render is really, really slow. It's really slow because we have a lot of faces. So if we go down here we can see we have like 10 per face, and I'm going to go ahead and just add one per face and do another render. As you see, that's too much hair. So we do have to go ahead and tweak this, and I think the main thing is going to tweak down the thickness of this one. And just make sure. We're going to add two divisions just so we have, and I'm going to render just a piece of it, just drag a piece on top of this and do another render. All right, that's much better. That's much faster. Again, it's all about going back and forth to tweak the look that we're going for. Again to the Attribute Editor. I'm just going to make the thickness a bit more thicker, just around, just so I can show you. All right. At 80. No, not 800. Sorry. Point line. I just wanted to show you the color. Usually the V-Ray fur takes the color of the mesh that that V-Ray fur is sitting on, so if you go back into the hypershade, you're going to see that the pilli shader, the pilli shader I created, and if we go to the diffuse color, we'll see this is the hot pink. And this is the really dark purple. You see? Hot pink, dark purple. All right, in the next lesson we will go ahead and tweak the V-Ray fur to get the look.