Subtitles of the Movie

Ok, you can see here when I look at the top of the attribute editor, the Lambert material in this little box, I can left mouse button on that and change to a blinn material, and I can change to a phong. So let's look at phong. The main difference between Lambert and phong, and blinn, is that phong and blinn materials allow you to control the shininess of a surface. The materials have a specular highlight - a Lambert material is completely mat and not shiny. So you have these other controls within the specular shading to our menu here. I can left mouse button here on this cosine power and scroll to the left to lower values, and you'll see that the specular highlight will enlarge. And now I can scroll to the right and the specular highlight will contract. So cosine power controls the size of the specular highlight for phong material. Specular color controls the brightness, so you'll see as I dial the specular color up, so too does the brightness of the specular highlight increase. We also have these other attributes, reflectivity and reflected color. Reflectivity is an attribute used with retracing in which real reflection is simulated. And reflected color is the attribute used to simulate reflection when you are ray casting, as to say casting light on surfaces only once. And also notice that these attributes also contain inputs for texture maps as well. So cosine power, the specularity of a surface can be controlled and regionalized using texture maps. Ok, I am going to change now to a blinn material - you'll see the shininess of the material change slightly. Of course it's not very well depicted in the movie that you are seeing but you should try it in Maya yourself. Here we see the controls for specularity or shininess change. You have eccentricity which functions a lot like cosine power - affects the size of the specular highlight. Specular roll off, controls the roll off of the specular highlight from a central point. And then you see specular color which controls the brightness of the highlight, and then you'll also see reflectivity and reflected color. Now the difference between these three materials will be plain to you when you look at them in your own, or on your own desktop, or as you work in Maya. Lambert material allows you to simulate perfectly mat surfaces, and phong and blinn allow you to simulate different types of shininess, either metallic or plastic shininess. Let's go on to Anisotropic - anisotropic material. There are a range of controls here. Understand that anisotropic materials where created to simulate the specularity of a surface with very small grooves, such as a CD, a record, or hair, in which a specular highlight falls or is created that is perpendicular to those grooves. It was a problem that was solved by the anisotropic material. The last thing that I'd like to talk about is the layered shader. A layered shader is too complicated to discuss but in detail, but I want to talk about it. A layered shader allows you to layer multiple materials on a single surface and layer multiple textures on those materials. You can create extremely complicated and precise rendered surfaces with the layered shader. You also have to use alpha channels, transparency channels - usually you'll create your textures in Photoshop and bring them in here. But you have a very very complicated range of inputs here in order to build up a palatable texture or a palatable rendered surface. So again we can understand the materials in terms of specularity. There are some other materials to get into, but for now blinn, Lambert, and phong should keep you busy, as well as anisotropic.