Maya Rendering Nodes Reference Library: Surfaces

Introduction and Project Overview
[Autogenerated] in this lesson will discuss the Maya Lambert material, and along the way we'll talk about it. A lot of the common surface coloration attributes that could be found really on almost all my material types. All right, so the name of the scene file was going to be Lambert start. So let's go ahead and first jump over to the hyper shade. Let's open up our split hyper shade perspective and let's just go down to the Lambert material. Click on this toe added into our hyper shade. And then we can just middle click and drop this on to our little tourists. Not so now, with this perspective, you active, let's go and take a render at what we have. So we give this just a moment and you can see that this Lambert material is actually really good for simulating really dull matte surfaces. So really something that doesn't have to be a shiny or have any sort of reflectivity to it at all. Now, to access this labor material, just go over to the hyper shade double click on the note, and now we have access to the attributes for this particular Lambert shader. So in this list. We're gonna talk about a few of these attributes for color, transparency, Indians and incandescence and then in one of our later lessons, will talk about some of these additional attributes. So the first attributes starting from the top is our color. This is really just the service color of this particular shader. So if I would've just click on this color chip, we could choose something like green, and you can see that the tourists not turns a little bit more this green color below this, we also have the transparency Pretty straightforward. This just controls the opacity of this object. So as this slider goes all the way to a white, we pretty much happened object that is entirely transparent. So if we were to just take a quick render of this, we really shouldn't see the object at all. Now, in addition to just making this object entirely transparent, we can also tent this transparency. If we were to come in and give this may be a little bit more of a greenish color, you can see that the transparency takes on a little bit more, the sort of a clear appearance now, normally, whenever using some sort of transparency or colored transparency. A lot of times I like to actually take the color and set this all the way down to black. Uh, what we can sometimes run into is a situation. If we're using certain render settings or sometimes using metal ray, we will actually start to get an additive effect between the color and the transparency. So if you have some sort of color value set in both, you can actually start to get some really unusual color interactions. So a lot of times, if I'm using colored transparency, I like to ah, just make sure that everything's gonna work fine by making sure the surface color set all the way to black. And now we have this transparency that is occurring but has now a little bit of coloration to it. And in one of our later lessons, when we start to talk about some of the ray tracing attributes will start to talk about some of the effects we can use to achieve more realistic, transparent surfaces. So for now, I'm gonna take this transparency, but this back to ______. That way, it's fully opaque and start to bring this color slider back up to some sort of a higher value and with this latest do is give us a little bit better opportunity to see the ambient and the incandescence. Now one of the things that you'll notice is if I were to re render this is that really were only receiving the effects of direct illumination. So right now we have two lights set up, one that's sort of a white light coming from this upper direction and one that's a blue light that sort of coming from this direction. Now, in these areas where we are actually getting any sort of lighting, we pretty much wind up with 100% black. So instead of having to fix this by starting to add more lights and spill lights and things like that really quick and easy way to fix this is to start to increase the amount of ambiance. So this is able to simulate the effect of ambient lighting. You know, the words lighting that is sort of indirectly bounced off of our objects and then on to some of our other objects in the scene. So what you'll see is if I were to save this for comparison. And now with this ambience increased just a little bit. How we now start to get a little bit more of this sort of the indirect illumination effect. This could be a really, really quick and easy way of simulating those types of lighting features. Now, one of the drawbacks to using this is that in these areas where we once had nice, dark shadows, you can see we pretty much start to ah, kind of soften those and overall do start to lose a little bit of our contrast in the shadows. So this is something that you want to ah, kind of experiment with and just find the right values for yourself. All right, Now with the ambiance, this actually does work in combination with our color. So what you'll notice is if the's surface color is said all the way to black, that really with the ambiance, we get no effect whatsoever. Keep in mind that the ambiance is really meant to simulate in direct illumination or sort of the indirect elimination effects. So it actually adds itself on top of this color information. So you'll notice once we start to use both these we start to get a little bit more of a blown out, sort of washed out effect, which is really what we can see here. So a lot of times, if you want to start to get some realistic ambient results, try to use this value for the slider very sparingly, with just a little bit of ambiance. All right. Excellent. Now, below the Indians, we have the controls for incandescence. Now, on the surface, it may look like incandescence is doing something very similar to ambience, but with the ambiance, this is actually being added on top of the color, the incandescence, instead of really making it look like indirect illumination that's bouncing and striking the surface, which is what the ambient does. The incandescence really tries to make the surface appear as though it's emitting light from itself. So if we were to bump up the incandescence and take a quick render this, we should start to see a little bit more of a brightening effect. Although at lower values, the incandescence doesn't look very similar to the ambient color. Now we can really start to see the difference. If we take this incandescence and really start to increase this and rear ender. Now we start to get these really, really bright effects. So this incandescence could be a really useful way of simulating things like physical light bulbs. If you actually need to represent the light source fluorescent light tubes, things like that, these could really easily be simulated with the effect of this incandescence. Now, one last thing I want to look at before we wrap up this lesson is the diffuse. Well, actually, talk about the bump mapping features in one of our later lessons will have a lesson that deals exclusively with how to use bump mapping that the diffuse is actually directly tied into this color Attribute, you'll notice right now we can actually get similar effects if we were to just darken this color. Ah, but really, this is pretty much just a slider that lets us control some sort of rgb value of this surface color. Have a diffuse you can really think of as awaiting value for this color. So right now, the diffuses set 2.8, which means we're looking at about 80% of this total green value in the surface. Now, if we were to start to drop this down. You couldn't start to see the effect of this really starting to lose a lot of the surface color. So now we're only looking Ah, if we were to give this a value of 0.2 now really looking at about 20% of this surface color and that's really exactly the effect that we start to get here. So this could be a useful feature as far as what you have your RGB value set just where you want them, you can start to increase or decrease the total intensity of what you're able to see by adjusting this diffuse. He said this all the way to one that is going to represent 100% of this surface color value. But we can actually overdrive this. So if we wanted to get anything higher than 100% we could actually increase this very, very high. But keep in mind that as you start to take this value past one, you'll probably start to get some effects that are probably not very realistic, as we can start to see. With this, we start to get some really, really blown out diffused lighting information in these areas that are actually being directly lit by some sort of a light source. All right, so that's a look at a lot of these common surface coloration attributes. And as I mentioned, these attributes can really be found on almost every one of these. My A material types with a few minor exceptions, and we'll explore some these unique shade ear's in their own lessons. So what will start to do now in some bar later lessons is we'll start to talk about some of the translucence attributes as well as the bump mapping features.