Exploring mental ray Materials in Maya
By Ed Whetstone
Course info
Course info
Description
In this Maya tutorial we will walk through creating a variety of challenging material types. These videos will walk through the essential tools for creating photorealistic materials. We'll start with establishing our shading toolkit through the various models of simulating real-world light interactions. Then we'll jump into a series of challenging material types, and develop the basic shading networks required to make them happen. The Dragon model is sourced from the Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory - http://graphics.stanford.edu/data/3Dscanrep/ Software required: Maya 2012.
About the author
Ed Whetstone is a Dallas-based CG artist, educator, and would-be filmmaker.
Section Introduction Transcripts
Introduction and Project Overview
(Music) Hello and welcome to this Creative Development tutorial from Digital Tutors. My name is Ed Whetstone. I work as a lighting artist in the CG Animation industry. At the studio, the lighters work with a team of shader developers and texture artists. Our teams have to work very closely together, because in a way, shading and lighting are the same thing. We provide the lights, but the shader artists have to determine exactly how the materials in the scene react to that light. Understanding shaders is essential to understanding lighting and vice versa. In this series of lessons, we'll first walk through the fundamentals of shaders, and immediately jump into a few tricky shading challenges in mental ray. We've got a lot of material to cover, and I'm excited to get started, so let's get into it.