Introduction to Maya 2012

In this lesson, let's start to combine and nest together several procedural nodes. So let's create a texture for the fuselage here. So I'm going to go into our hypershade, let's create a new blin, and we'll call this something like Body Blin. And let's go ahead and drop in a grid to start with. So just as we did on the tube, we'll go ahead and add a grid. Let's add our material to our object. And now let's change our grid settings to get something that looks a little bit more like the panels that we want. So taking a look at this material, we'll go into our grid. And let's first decrease the width of the lines, so maybe 0.05, let's go into our Place2DTexture node. Let's start to change these values, let's also turn on Stagger so we get a little bit of a staggered effect here. And now we can start to play with these values to get something that looks a little bit more like what we want. So if we want something that has longer panels, or can have more space there, if I want to have more divisions, more panel divisions, we can go ahead and add more divisions that way. And so just get something that you're happy with. I want to reverse this grid, so I want to make the lines black and the fill white. Let's go ahead and decrease the width again so it's a little bit thinner. So we end up with something like that. Let's go ahead and duplicate this. Let's pipe it into the bump. Let's change the fill to 50% gray for the bump. Now what I want to do is to go ahead and add some color variation to this. And so what we can do is to go ahead inside of our grid, which is the grid that's set to the color, so this is the grid that's piped into the color. Now, we have options for line color and fill color which we can change. So you see I can change that fill, but we don't have to leave this as a basic color. We can actually pipe something else into this color. So let's pipe a ramp into the color for the fill of the grid. So we'll go ahead and get a ramp. Now the ramp I'm going to set to a different type of ramp. So you can see that here, I'm going to set it to a box ramp. And inside of the ramp-- we go ahead and get our ramp-- inside of the placement for the ramp. So here's the placement for the grid, 8 x 6 staggered. So in the ramp I'm going to do the same thing, 8 x 6 staggered. And so now you can see we have one instance of that ramp inside each of those panels. That kind of makes sense. And so now what we can do is go into our ramp, and start to play with these colors that we have here. So for the base color, maybe we want to have something that is-- let's do kind of a blue, maybe something like that. For the center area, maybe we want that to be still a blue, but maybe just a little bit lighter. And then up here we want this to be a bit darker. So we can grab that blue, but we can kind of darken it up a little bit. And so we can start to get some variation, some shading along the side here. So let's go ahead and smooth transition here. I want to lighten this up I think just a little on the inside here. Just kind of lighten that up a bit, darken that. If we want to get a sharper edge on that shadowing we can do that. All right, let's go ahead and do an IPR render of this just so we can get a little bit better idea of what that's actually looking like. You can see that since we have the reflectivity on this, you can see the reflection there. Now I want to make the lines much thinner on this, so I'm go ahead and push this in. And then on our actual grid, let's go ahead and thin those up there. And then in the bump grid, thin those up as well. And you may have to thin them up even a little bit more. We can take that bump value and take that down a bit. And still, I don't want them quite so thick, so take that down even a little bit more, and it just kind of helps to tighten that up a little bit. And you can continue to play with the settings there. Now we can also even extend this a little bit further. So here is the ramp that is the color on the inside of each of these panels. We can go in and start to add a little bit of noise to this. So if I select this instead of choosing a color for this ramp, we can again go in and select another node to use for that. So let me just get a noise. So you can see here, that noise, how it's taking the place of that color in the center. So I can change some values here in the noise, make it a bit lighter, make it a bit darker. It's still white and black, basically, so I can go down into color balance. You can see as I take some of these colors down here, we've got the default, we've got the colored gain. We can choose colors for these, make that a blue, and then we can offset it a little bit. And so we can start to add a little bit of noise to this. We can change the type of noise that we've got there. Kind of lighten that up a bit until we get the color the way that we want it. Let's go back into our material, let's dial down our reflectivity just a little bit, so let's maybe change this to 0.10. Go back into our ramp, and take this and kind of darken it up a little. If you want to add some noise to this one, too, we can come in and add some noise to that lighter color. Again, taking our color gain, adding a little bit of color to that, maybe lightening it up a bit. And then you can just play around with the values for that. So you can see how we can start to really nest a lot of different things together to get what we are looking for. Let's lighten this up a bit. So you can see we can get that variation there. Go back in and we increase our saturation on that just a little bit. And just play around with the color until you get something that is a little bit closer to what you want-- maybe get that a little bit darker. And you can change the values up here to get different effects as well, as well as changing the type of noise that you're working with. Whether it's billowy, or wispy, or whatever it is. So once you've got that dialed in the way that you want, you can see how we've created a large network here of all of these sort of nested procedural nodes going into this single material. The next thing that we want to talk about is adding specialized material. So we can add things like chrome, or metallic paint, things like that. So we'll take a quick look at that in the next lesson.