Week 3 - Autodesk Maya - Textures and Materials

 Week 3 - Introduction to Textures and Materials

What have I learned so far?

In this week’s task, I have learned how to correctly use textures and materials. I have also learned how to UV unwrap with tools such as cut and sew that enabled me to create seamless models.

There are several materials that can be applied to a model to give it a different type of finish. A material determines how a model will look, for example, different materials will have different reflectivity or shine. Materials like plastic and metal will have a fairly high shine and reflectivity level, and materials such as chalk and wood will not be as shiny or reflect light as well. There are lots of types of materials in Maya, this gives us a base material to then create a texture, these materials include:

• Lambert: this is the default material that is applied by Maya, this is good for matte surfaces such as chalk (previously mentioned) as it doesn’t produce any specular  highlights and therefore useful for unpolished surfaces with little to no reflectivity. 
• Blinn: this material is used for creating metallic surfaces, such as brass and aluminium. It has softer highlights so is suited better so softer metals. Because of this, it reflects lights much more accurately.
• Phong: this material has hard specular lights, making it more suited to glossy surfaces, such as plastics and car molds etc. It also takes the curvature of a model into account, and therefore it can disperse light more accurately.
• Phong E: this is a similar material to Phong, except it’s more simplified, this means that it renders light faster and softer whilst being more dispersed than that of Phong. Models with harsh highlights are best with Phong, everything else should be used with Blinn.
• Rampshader: this is the material/shader that allows the user to create spectrums of colour on a model, therefore giving the user more control over the material settings than any of the previously listed materials. Compatibility with other softwares is very limited however, so Rampshaders won’t be used often by us as students.

Using the information provided, we have been given the task of modelling a single die and applying a material that’s best suited to its real life material. In the creation of this die, I used a net provided by “Printable Board Games” (2014 - 2020), and used this as a reference to create the faces and numbers for the die.

          Savetz Publishing. “Printable Die.” Printable Printable Die, 2014, www.printableboardgames.net/preview/Printable_Die. 

I also used a Boolean operation in this project by creating several cylinders and subtracting them from the faces, this gave me an “inlaid” face for a circular number. I then added a Phong material to the main body of the die and made this white to reflect accuracy with the die, I also added a Phong material the subtracted cylinders in the die and made this black with low reflectivity so that I got a concentrated highlight to make this more realistic. In order to create the rounded shape of the die I bevelled the edges and vertices. Once this was done and the material was applied, I was left with this finished die:

Overall I was happy with the result, I thought the highlights on the material were fairly realistic, however I believe I should have made the edges and vertices smoother, giving it a smoother overall design. After this week’s task, I’m excited to carry on further with similar work.