Maya 2022 Advanced: Materials and Textures

Name: Maya 2022 Advanced: Materials and Textures
Author: Stephen Steinbach

Create realistic organic character textures in Maya 2022.

Preview the first lesson free — get full access to all 4 lessons.

Course: On-Demand

Hello, my name is Steven Steinbach and in these lessons we're going to texture the alien character. Oh, okay, so back to our alien character. Let's look at the UVs again. So we'll go to UV editor and we have a nice unwrap here. Everything's evenly spaced. And to what we wanna do first is we want to create a UV snapshot. So this is just a image of this copied. And to do that, we're gonna go to UV snapshot. And this is a size 1248, big enough. And the edge color could be anything here. And this is where it's going to apply. So go ahead and hit apply. So if you open this up in Photoshop or an equivalent program you'll see that we have this here on a separate layer. And I just added a fill color underneath so you can see that better. So the goal is actually to get some photo references something like this and do some image image manipulation which is beyond the scope of this class. But what we want to end up with is something similar to something like this. And you can see here that I'm trying to put the nose and the mouth right there on the UVs. And I just used the clones tool to add the texture out as well. And if you look in closer, you can see that I've added sort of a nice little texture in here as well. Now if you look closely, you'll start to see this detail like right here and here, and there's a little bit of some scratches and things like that. And that's gonna be done with a speculator or displacement map. And in Photoshop it looks something like this. So right here, if I get in closer here, if I wanted to get all that lines in here or these creases anything white will be displaced into the texture. So I basically just have two maps. I have the displacement map and I have the texture here which I saved out as a PNG. And a lot of this is done with things like the clone stamp tool where I can sample over here and paint like this. And I just say these out as PNGs. And so that's basically it as far as the texturing goes. Okay, so let's begin to texture of the alien. To begin the texture, let's select the head. Let's type three on the keyboard. Right click, assign new material and with this assigned material, choose Arnold shader, AI standard surface. Okay, so we have a lot of history on this as we built this model and we can delete this history now. And we do that by going to edit, delete by type history. And now we see this standard shader. So let's name the skin. So I wanna show you the file for the final product real quick. I just want you to see this. So this is the actual view port render and it doesn't look anything like the render. But what we can do is we can go to renderer and switch over to Arnold and we're gonna get a more realistic view of that. This does slow down and every time you move the camera it has to re-render so it's not as fast and responsive as the viewport renderer. Okay, so let's switch over to that renderer. And we do that by going to render Arnold, hit the play button and it's gonna be black. Okay, that's because we don't have any lights in here. And let's just create a light for now. We're gonna lights and do a area light. And let's just bring this forward and up here, right back here and over to the side a little bit here. And over here in the intensity, let's increase the intensity and let's increase the exposure and let's get that bigger as well. Okay and up and down a bit. Okay, so we'll make adjustments to this as we go. And the larger you make it, the brighter it's gonna be. All right. So let's select the mesh itself, and let's go over to the skin and the attribute editor. Let's go to color. And the first thing we're gonna do is pick that file that we did. So I'm gonna click on this checkerboard and we'll go to file, then select the file here and find that file. Okay, so I find that file that I was looking for and press open. And if you happen to be in the viewport render here, you will not see the texture but you can if you click on this texture and you can see that it looks pretty good, but it's not quite the same. So I'm gonna go back to the Arnold renderer. Okay, so let's select the head again and come up here to this button here and go to the hyper shade. Or if you don't see that icon, you can go to window, rendering editors, hyper shade. Okay, with this selected in this window here, right click and graph material on selection. So here's the skin texture. And what you see in the hyper shade is very similar to the attribute editor. So you can see right here that we have the color ramp here and we can add things here as well. So to do this, we're going to hit the tab key and we'll start typing file and we'll go file texture. Okay, so you can see that this node connection here and we want to find the same file again. So we'll double click on this and go to file name. And we'll go to the images. And that's gonna be the face two open. And we want to put this out color into the subsurface color. Let's minimize the hyper shader. And now we are starting to get a decent base color. In the next lesson we're going to add the and roughness to the skin shader. Thanks for watching.

Advanced Provider : Stephen Steinbach 4 Lessons · 17m in Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese

Course Description

These lessons walk through the process of creating high-quality maps of our alien character’s head. To start, you will learn how to render a UV snapshot and import the file into Photoshop or a similar digital manipulation program. We will explore the various techniques of image manipulation to create a realistic diffuse and specular map. Next, we will go over Hypershade, demonstrating how to create a realistic skin texture.

In these lessons, follow along as we create realistic texture maps for our alien character's head. You’ll learn how to create a high-quality render-pass, and how to set up attributes in the AIShader, including subsurface scattering, for realistic skin. In addition, you will learn how to create another standard AIShader material for the eyes. We will customize the AI shaders to create a realistic skin texture and material for our alien character. Finally, you will learn how to create a high-quality render in Arnold using an HDRI light to gain the desired results.

What You'll Learn

Create a diffuse and specular map by rendering a UV snapshot and manipulating the image in Photoshop or a similar program
Create a realistic skin texture using Hypershade
Modify a standard AI shader and set up attributes including subsurface scattering for realistic skin
Create a standard AIShader material for the eyes
Adjust settings to produce a high-quality render-pass
Create a high-quality render in Arnold using an HDRI light

Key Takeaways

The course walks through creating high-quality maps for an alien character's head, starting with rendering a UV snapshot and importing it into Photoshop or a similar program.
Hypershade is used to create a realistic skin texture, while the AIShader is customized with attributes such as subsurface scattering for realistic skin.
A separate standard AIShader material is created for the character's eyes.
Final rendering is done in Arnold using an HDRI light to achieve the desired results.

Frequently Asked Questions

What will I create in this course?

You will create high-quality texture maps for an alien character's head, including a diffuse and specular map, a realistic skin texture and material, and a material for the eyes, then produce a high-quality render in Arnold.

What topics does this course cover?

It covers rendering a UV snapshot and image manipulation in Photoshop, creating skin texture in Hypershade, setting up AIShader attributes including subsurface scattering, creating an eye material, and lighting and rendering in Arnold with an HDRI light.

What lessons are included?

The lessons are Skin Material, Skin Texture, Eye Material, and Lighting and Rendering.

What skills does this course build?

It builds skills in Autodesk Maya, Materials Studio, procedural texture, texturing, and texture artistry, aligned with the Autodesk Maya Certified User track.

What software is used in this course?

The course uses Autodesk Maya 2022, the Hypershade and AIShader within Maya, the Arnold renderer with HDRI lighting, and Photoshop or a similar digital manipulation program for editing maps.