Subtitles of the Movie

Now I'm going to create a little scene that we can use to explore the basics of shaders. Shaders are materials that determine things like the color of a surface, how reflective it is, shininess, dullness, bumpiness, but the real basics of it are just simply what kind of color the thing has. So to start off, I'm going to create a polygon primitive pipe, and I'm actually going to head to this little option box off to the right of the word Pipe. This will bring up the tool settings for that object, and first thing to do in these if you aren't sure if you're going to get the defaults is to click the button that says Reset Tool. I've reset this to the defaults, the factory defaults, and now I'm going to turn on Round Cap. This will give it a little rounded end, which will look nice, and after Creation Settings, I'm going to turn on Adjust Subdivisions and Adjust Cap Subdivisions, and we'll see what these are in a second. And now I can close this window and start by dragging out the diameter of the pipe, now dragging up to set the height, drag to edit the thickness, and now I'm dragging to increase the number of subdivisions and drag to edit the cap subdivisions. This will give us our roundness. Okay. Now I'm going to rotate this by hitting E. I've switched to the Rotate tool, and then I'm going to hit W, drag that up a little bit. When I want to create a new material the simple way is to right click on the object and from this drop down menu, I'm going to choose Assign New Material, and I'll get a long list of possible material types. I'm going to choose Lambert, which we'll go into more later about some different material types. I'll just say right now a Lambert is one of the simpler types. It gives us dull surfaces that have no component for specularity or shininess. So now I have the Attribute Editor has opened up automatically and this gives me a list of attributes that I can alter for the current node, in this case, the Lambert 3 material. First one that I'm going to adjust in here is color, and you have a couple of ways dealing with these. First is simply sliding the attributes' values left and right, and this goes from black to white in this case. If I want to get color I can actually click on little rectangle color here. This is called the Color Swatch. Click on that once with the left mouse button, and I get the Color Chooser. And now as I adjust in this color wheel, I can see the color updating on my object. So I can select for hue and saturation by dragging around this color wheel or color cube, and then I can push the value to make it a brighter or darker version of that hue and saturation by dragging this slider up and down on the left. Now Maya will express the color in a few different ways depending on what you want to use. You've got hue, saturation, and value, and this little drop down says HSV. We can also choose RGB values, which you may be more familiar with from Photoshop. By default, this expresses red, green, and blue channels in a zero to one. I'm going to switch this to zero to 255. This'll help you if this is the way you're used to working in Photoshop to match a value, if you have a number that you're going to choose that you can switch each of these channels to some value between zero and 255. You also have an eye dropper you can use here, so if you look at the top of the Color Chooser click on this eye dropper icon, and then you can find other items in the scene. In this case, white for my background or even from the interface, I can grab blue off one of these shelves and then proceed to adjust that further if you like. So I'll hit Accept down at the bottom of the Color Chooser, and this will plug that color in and close that window. I have other settings here. Transparency. You can see that as I drag this the surface becomes invisible. Ambient color is something that you'll see either in a final render or in this material sample ball right here. This is bringing up the color of the surface in areas that are not receiving light. This would normally be black, but one way to fake a bit of bounced light in a scene is to increase the ambient color on your shaders. Incandescence is a self-illumination, like a glowing object, so as I increase this the object itself starts to brighten itself into a white at the end. That's all we're going to look at in the basics of the materials, and we'll be exploring more about these later.