Introduction to Maya 2012

In this lesson, we'll talk about the use of ramps to modulate color over our objects. So let's concentrate up here on the fan, and let's start with this object here. And we'll also add a new material, so let's go ahead and get a blin. And so we'll go ahead and add the blin to the nose cone there, and we can just call this Nose Blin, or something like that. Now I want to actually change the color over the surface of this. And this is going to be based on the UVs, which in this case it's a NURBS object, so we don't really have UVs that we can modify. It's simply set up from the top to the bottom, and so let's not really worry too much about the UVs, let's just think about this as kind of a flat, plain object that's wrapped around. We'll talk about setting up UVs in a few lessons. But for now let's just think about this as a kind of an object that we're applying this ramp too, and then we can kind of go from there. So in our nose blin, we want to change the color over the surface of this object. So under Color, you can see that there's a little box over here on the right hand side. We can go ahead and click on this, and this will allow us to have different nodes piped in to the color. So in this case we want to go ahead and choose a 2D texture under Maya, and we want to choose a ramp. You can see it's this sort of rainbow effect here. Now, we have the ramp piped in to the colors which we can see if we show our connections. You can see here is our ramp, this is a placement node that gives us options for tiling and things like that. And you can see that that's actually piped into the color of this material. And you can see it reflected here on the actual material itself, and here's a preview of the actual ramp. Now, we can't see it on our model. We need to go to Shading, and turn on Hardware Texturing, that will allow us to see the actual ramp. Now right now if we look at the object, and we look at the actual ramp itself, you can see that it goes from blue to red-- blue at the top, red at the bottom. So here we can see that this is the actual scene where the ramp ends. So this is the top of the ramp coming down, going through this green, all the way down to this red. So here's the top of the ramp, here's the bottom of the ramp. You can kind of see how that applies to our model, that kind of makes sense. So let's go ahead and jump into the ramp by double-clicking on it. And here we have some options at the top for the type of ramp that we want to have. Now a V-ramp, in this case, is going from the side all the way around to the other side. If we change the type to a U-ramp, it's going to go from the end to that end, and this is actually what we want. We also have the interpolation that we can change. So right now it's a linear interpolation. We can make that smooth so it's kind of the interpolation between these different colors which are associated with these dots which we can move around. So, for instance, I've got a blue dot, a green dot, and a red dot. So in the center it's green, if I move this down towards the red, you can see that that moves that green down towards the red end. So when I click on any of these dots, it gives me the option to change the selected color. And this position corresponds to its position along the ramp, so what we want to do is go ahead and modify these colors. Now if we want to get rid of any color, we can click on the little x. If we want to add a new color in here into the ramp, we can just click in here anywhere, change the color. And now we've got a new color in our ramp. If we want to get rid of that, we can just hit the x. So as we get these colors tighter and tighter together, you can see there's more of a sharp line between those colors versus a smooth transition. If we say no interpolation, that just gives us a completely straight line-- so something like that, which in many cases is probably useful. In this case, I want to use this to change the color of this object. So where this is red, I'm going to replace that with a gray. So I'm going to choose the red, and then I'm going to choose a gray instead so this bottom part is gray. I'm going to move this green down-- and using bright colors like this, even if you're not going to end up using those colors, sometimes it's good because it's really easy to tell where the transition is. So we'll go ahead and bring that green down so that this cap is there. Let's go ahead and replace that green with kind of an orange or a red. And we can take the saturation out of it a bit, darken it a little, maybe put a little bit more red in there. Now I'm using these colors, feel free to use whatever colors that you like. Maybe brighten that up just a little. Now, for the blue we can actually take that out and that just gives us basically a two-color ramp. On one object we're able to define two different colors. Now we can move this transition. If we want to make the entire thing orange, we could do that, or the entire thing white, we could do that. Now we can also, if we go in here and change our interpolation, you can see how we start to get a very smooth transition. I can click in here to make another gray, and use that to tighten that up giving you sort of the effect of having that really tight transition. Now if I want to make this sort of dark at the back, like maybe it's dirty or something like that, we can go in and select this bottom part of the ramp which is back here, and just kind of darken that up. We could come in here and tighten that up a little bit. And let me see how we can create some shading or dirt in there. We could do the same thing in here if we wanted to. If we want to lighten up the ends, we could add another button right up here, lighten that up, and that will affect the end down here. So there's a lot of stuff that we can do with a ramp. Let's go ahead and create another ramp. Let's create another blin. And this time we'll connect this ramp in a slightly different way. So let's go ahead and apply the ramp to all of our fan blades. So we'll just click on one of these at the up arrow to select them all, and then right-click to assign material. So all our fan blades are assigned this material. These are NURBS as well, so again let's not worry too much about the UVs at this point. So we have the color here, we'll call this Fan Blade Blin. And rather than coming in here and choosing a ramp through here, let's go ahead and just create one. So under Maya 2 detectors we have a ramp, so we could just click that and select both of these, show the connections here. And so now in our work area, we have our material and we have our ramp which is not connected to our material yet. So all we need to do is, from the ramp, middle-mouse drag over to the material, and this will give us the option of what we actually want to connect this into. So we could use default-- in this case, we'll pipe it right into the color. We can select our link and delete it if we want to, and then do it again. And this time instead of choosing Default, we can actually choose Color-- specifically tell it we want to use the color. So now we'll jump into our ramp. We can change the type of ramp to a U-ramp. Now let's change our green to kind of a gray. And then our red-- let's change our interpolation-- our red let's actually make kind of a black. Let's add another instance right in here, dial that down so we just get that black in the center. And then for the blue, we'll change that to black as well. This just gives us a little bit of shading on both ends of our fan blades, and just helps us add a little bit more interest here just for the very simple ramp. Now, it may be a little bit too much. If you want to take that black and sort of lighten it up a little we can do that. We can also come in down here and start to add a little bit of noise in here, and you can kind of see what that looks like. So if we're going for dirt, maybe adding a little bit of noise could help. And that just kind of breaks things up a little bit so it's not just a straight line across. And that's just a different way of hooking up our nodes, in this case it's a ramp. So you can go in here, pipe it through, or you can actually just manually connect that node up after creating it. So that's a quick look at using ramps in our textures. In the next lesson, let's take a look at adding multiple materials to objects so our objects can actually have more than one material assigned. So we'll go ahead and look at that in the next lesson.