Maya for Beginners: Texturing

1. Course Overview: Welcome to Maya for beginners, a course on texturing. This is part of a larger course series, but you can take this course by itself and still follow along because you can download all of the course files. This course could actually be called Look Development because we're going to cover many more things than just texturing. We're going to be covering UVs, lighting, texturing, shading, rendering, and all of that's called look development. But it's just easier to call this course Texturing for the true beginner may not know about what Look Development actually is and that's what you're going to learn in this course, all of these steps. We're going to dive a little deeper into Maya, learn a few technical aspects, but also flex our artist muscles where we will paint individual textures inside of Maya. We're going to add realism to the Ghostbuster trap, no need for any other program like Photoshop or anything like that and don't forget to download the file so you can follow along and add some color and texture to these models. Thanks for watching. 2. Download Maya: 4 Options: Hi. Welcome to this updated version of the lesson on how to and where to get Maya. Maya is a software created by Autodesk. You can go to autodesk.com/free-trials to get a free trial of Maya. Now if you're a student and you can prove that through their criteria that they require on their website, you can get a full version of Maya for one year for free if you're a student. The only thing that it has is a little pop-up window that says, "This is a student version of Maya you can't use it for commercial purposes." Which means you can't make money using that software by the work you do with it. The next best option is the Indie license, and that you can get if you go currently, the URL is makeanything.autodesk.com/maya-indie. Now, the Indie license is a relatively new thing and is celebrated by Maya community because it is so much cheaper than the other license that you can get. Maya Indie has no restrictions except for how much money you can make. I think it's maybe a $100,000 where it varies depending on the country that you're living in. Details will be on the site after you pick what country you're in and download the software. But basically it's a full version of Maya, there is no lack of features and it is one-tenth to one-twelfth as expensive as the traditional license. That's why it was so celebrated when they decided to take the Indie license and offer it to more people. It was just something they did on a trial basis and they decided to keep it around. Grab it while you can it's a one-year license for roughly US $250, and that price varies depending on the country you're in. Now the alternative, the final option that you have that I doubt anyone will pick if they have the Indie version available is the full subscription of Maya which is $1,620. The Indie license is a steal based on the traditional pricing that we're used to with Maya. So I highly, highly recommend you go grab the Indie license on the makeanything.autodesk.com/maya-indie website. If you're not sure if you want to put down even that $250 or whatever it may be for the country you're in, definitely get the free trial for 30 days and get through some of this course and see if it's something you would want to continue to pursue and put down that money to get the Indie license. But I encourage you if you are interested and you're committed to learning and using Maya on a yearly basis, $250 per year is a bit of a steal, so definitely go check that out. Thanks for watching this updated lesson on how and where to get Autodesk Maya and I will continue to update things as they change. This course was made in 2018.6 Maya version. The latest as I'm recording this lesson is Maya 2020.4. Not much has changed between the version that you're watching in this course and the version available today. From 2018-2020, there's not been a ton of updates in the core features of Maya, so everything still applies. As there's new features, I will update the course and will do my best there. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Interface Intro: Welcome to this first lesson in Maya where we're going to cover the interface. It's the first thing you see when you open Maya, it's good to get familiarized with it and as you go through this course, you will become more and more familiar with it and comfortable using it but it's a great place to start, just that we know what we're looking at because it's easy to get intimidated when you're first starting to learn 3D. I know I was when I opened up a program and you see all of these buttons and all of these menus and you have no idea what's important and what's not and it just looks like some crazy alien interface and where to even begin with that. That's why I have this lesson, you're going to refer back to it but it's also just to ease your fears. You're not going to need to learn every single little button and menu option here to be successful in Maya and use it. I'm going to show you the things that we use the most and in this interface I'm going to show you how to visually categorize these things. You can know, I'm probably not going to use this visually I don't need to worry about that chaos of all these buttons up here. Let's just take an overall look at this. Normally when you open up Maya, you're going to get some type of a view like this and you can see down here that it says persp and that tells us the camera view that we're viewing in the viewport and that's what this middle section is here, this is called the viewport and you can see the axis down here on the lower left. You can see Y is up and Z is to the left and this is where we're going to see everything that's happening in our scene and down here we have a timeline for when we start animating. We can scrub this, we can play it over here, we can set it to loop back several times by clicking that we can turn on auto key, turn that off, change the frame range, all these things but typically when I'm using this, I use it just like this, I scrub, I look and then I can change frame range, clicking and dragging that or typing in numbers here and these two numbers actually just mean the in and out points of what we're looking at versus the whole scene. You can see we can adjust this and slide this around but it doesn't change the first number and that's why that's the absolute values of the in and out of the scene but we can temporarily change that scale, we can see a smaller scale of the timeline. It's easier to scrub a smaller section if it's a very big shot or something like that and if you double click it and it will jump out to the whole thing and maximize to the entire length of the frame range that you've set. That's the bottom part and you can see down here in the bottom left, this will be very helpful as you're starting. This will display short helped tips and tools and selections. If I'm going up here and I don't know what this is and I hover over it, I'll get a tool tip that will pop up but if you're looking in the lower left as well, it'll say the same thing. If you're a little impatient for the tool tip to pop up. You can just look in the lower left and you can see as I scrub my mouse through, I'm not clicking anything, I'm just hovering over everything. You can see as showing me what each one of these tools is named and what they do and if you leave it over there, the tool tip will also pop up. That's one quick way to figure out what all these little things do up here. Don't worry about what each one of them does yet, we'll get into that later but just know these are different tabs for different sections and these sections are also related to these different drop down menus here. Maya tries to organize the menus into different disciplines. You can see modeling rigging animation, it's all separated it into their own menu sets because typically, if you're doing one, you're not really going to be doing the other and in a production, normally this is the linear workflow of how things are made anyways, first you model something, then you rig it, then you animate it, for example, you can't really animate something that doesn't exist. You have to model it first and if you're going to rig it than you need to rig it before animation. They try to do it in an order that makes sense for how you're going to create things and animate things and render things. That's why these are ordered the way they are and you can see that they change the menu options up here but only after Windows. You can watch Windows and as I change the options, Windows stays the same. Everything from file to Windows is never going to change and everything after that will and a lot of these things. I'm in the animation tab here and the drop down menu and I'm on animation shelf here and you can see there's play blast, there's different options and a lot of those things are also here, you can see play blast is here as well. It's the same icon, it's the same tool tip. Even though there's all these different buttons, they actually just put them in more than one place. It makes it look more complicated than it is because the same option is put in several different places, for example with play blast, I could actually even right click on the timeline down here and it's off the screen but if you do this on your Maya you can go down to the bottom and you can see an option for play blast again, play blast for example, is in three different places. This is also another reason why not to get overwhelmed by all these options because visually it looks there's a ton of them but really they're just the same ones over and over in different ways depending on how you want to work or select options or menus or how you want to select tools then they try to give you as many options as you want really, which is a little too much. Typically you're only ever going to use this up here or the shelf. It's whatever you're comfortable with. I find it hard to remember what each one of these icons are and then to wait for the tool tip to pop up. Typically when I'm going through the menu up here and I'm not using this as much but it's definitely nice to have sometimes on a couple different things. In this course I'm probably going to make a couple of spheres just to show you how things work. We'll get into manipulating things in the next lesson but besides that, I don't really use this shelf options all that much. Now that we have this shelf option and some of these menu things covered. Let's look at what's in between them. We can see this drop down menu that we talked about then there's all these buttons up here and they all do different types of things that we're going to get into a lot later. For right now, just know that you don't really have to worry about any of these things and we'll slowly cover these later. These aren't super super important in getting started, we're just going to skip them now for the interface, don't worry about these. The next thing we want to look at are these different windows as well. We have a blank Window here, we have blink Window here. They have their own little tabs here and then there's these tabs on the side. It seems there's a ton of options but it's really not. For example with this tab, this can actually be closed down by clicking it or double clicking it to open it back up but if you noticed here, this little button gets highlighted and unhighlighted as we're clicking it. It's the same thing we were talking about earlier in the play blast. It's just a different way to select menu options here. You can do it from up here or you can do it from this tab. You can see the modeling tool kit, we can go back to the attributes or we could select over here. Why this is significant is because if I create a sphere, this is going to tell me the name, it's going to tell me where it is in space, is it on? Is it visible? And the history of the object and any inputs there are. I can see what the inputs are. This is a quick way to see what's the status of this object where it is. If I go to the attribute editor, I can see this information displayed a little bit differently. I can see, translate as all zero. If we go back to the channel box, we can see that's shown here as well. Just the same thing shown twice like we were talking about earlier. I want to help simplify this stuff in your mind, you don't feel like that. This is something different than this. It's not, it's the same thing, it's just in a different place. Just to emphasize this again, I wanted to show you something that I use quite a bit. If you hold down the space bar, you'll get the hotbox menu, what Maya calls the hotbox menu and I'm holding down space bar and I have all of the menu options available to me. You might be able to tell that it is the same exact way that the tabs over here ordered. Modeling, you can see mesh, mesh, edit Mesh, edit Mesh, mesh tools, mesh tools and so on and so on. You can see rigging, animation, effects and rendering and that's the exact same way this is laid out over here. It's just a quicker way to get to all of these menus is by holding down space bar and I use that quite a bit. It took me a couple of years to get used to it and actually use it because I think it does take a little familiarity with Maya to feel comfortable with this but the sooner you use this, the quicker you'll be in Maya and I would highly encourage you to use this instead of having to hunt around for stuff up here and changing menus, you can get to everything right here by holding down space bar. That's a pretty useful tip that I think will be useful even more later. Now that we know what the channel box is and the difference with the attribute editor, let's jump over to this section and we can see the viewport has its own options and if you hover over each one of these objects, you'll also get the tool tip and I won't go over each one of these because to be honest they're not very helpful as a beginner starting out, these aren't really that important but I did want to talk about the different views in Maya. If I don't hold down space and just tap it you can see I get multiple views and typically what you'll see, just click this over here is something like this when you're just starting out in Maya. If I hit space bar again with my mouse just hovering over a different window, I'm not clicking anything with my mouse. I can jump into those views and you can see what the views are by the camera name, top Y front Z, side X perspective and we can jump between different perspective views if we need to see something top down and modeling, we can do that. That's one quick way to divide up the screen as well. If we wanted to divide the screen in a different wave and go to panels, layouts and we can say two panes side-by-side and that's what I had earlier that you saw and because this is the way I like to animate sometimes. I can get back to the perspective view just by hitting space bar and these buttons over here just shortcuts to these different modes as well. Instead of hitting space bar, you can jump through and one of the last things I want to talk about is the outlier and the outliner you're going to have open and spend a lot of time in because it's basically a table of contents of what's in your scene. You can see that we have these different cameras that we saw earlier when we are in the for view setup and they're all gray because they're hidden. We can't actually see them in the interface. We can see that the P sphere one and that's one way that we can select this object or we can select it just by clicking it, left mouse clicking. That's two ways to select things either through the outliner or through the viewport, that is a quick rundown on the interface. I hope it got you a little more familiarized with what you're looking at when you open up Maya, it's not as intimidating as it seems and if you follow along with this course, you will just pick up these things and I won't have to walk through each little button in a dry way. We'll take a project based approach so that you'll get more familiar with the interface as we go along. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson where we will briefly cover manipulators and how to move stuff around in Maya. Thanks for watching. 4. Manipulators And Camera Movement: Welcome back, and let's quickly cover how to move things around in Maya. There's a couple of things to understand, especially in 3D, that's important. Let's jump right in and cover that. From the previous lesson, I still have the sphere here. If you don't have that, I can just delete that, and we can go up here to this polygon sphere and click that. You can also get to it by going to Create, Polygon Primitives, and Sphere. One other thing that's kind of fun with these menus is you can actually tear them off. You can see there's this little option here. If I hover my mouse just above this, and most menus have this, this one has it, most all of these menus have this little option here. If anyone's going to make a lot of primitives, a lot of spheres or something, just as an example, I can just click that, and I'll have this kind of menu torn off. Now I can click this a bunch of times and if I open up my Outliner, Windows Outliner, I can see I made a bunch of spheres. We only need one, so I'm going to Shift select all of those below it and hit Delete, and I'll select the sphere here. I'm also going to click and drag this outliner, and let it hover here and let go, so it'll kind of dock it in the window here. I'm going to close this menu that I had hovering, and now I can get back to it up here if I want. Now that we have the sphere, you can see that there's these squares and different things going on here. So let's take a look. The way that we manipulate things in Maya is basically through several different tools. One of which is you may have already seen by hitting "Q" you can get to the Select Tool or you select it up here. It's just the cursor option. I can select the Object here just by left mouse clicking. I can also select it from the outliner here. We've got the objects selected, but now I want to move it. How do I move it? I can hit "W" on my keyboard to pull up the shortcut for the manipulator. I can also select it over here. You can see the Move Tool is what the tooltip says, and you can see as well that in parentheses, it says, "W". We can also see the shortcut is listed there. Now with the sphere selected, and if you notice, even with the Move Tool selected, I can select different Objects. You don't always have to have the Select Tool selected to select new things. You can have the Move Tool selected and you can still select stuff. You can also click and drag to select things in a group. Now that we have this one thing, let's move it around. I can click any axis and it'll be isolated to that axis. I'll undo that. You can see it's isolated because the axis manipulator turned yellow. If I click the vertical one, it turns yellow or the z-axis, it also turns yellow. So now I know, no matter if my mouse is going up and down or something weird, that it's only going to go along that axis. But if I want to have a free movement, I can just click in the middle and move the thing around wherever I want it. The other thing I can do is isolate on two axes, and that's what these little squares are here that I can know I'm only moving it in the vertical and x-axis. I use these quite a bit actually because in 3D space it's hard to tell where you're moving something sometimes. It's hard to tell if that's actually vertically up or if I moved it back and space. So by selecting these, you can tell that I'm not moving it up. I'm moving it in the x and the z on this flat plane, this grid. If you can't see this grid for some reason, if it didn't default to that, you can also turn that on here or turn it off if it's distracting. That's one of these little options up here. Now that we know how to move things around, let's rotate it so we can hit "E" on the keyboard, and similarly we can find it over here in this little Tool Box window. You can actually turn off these options from windows, UI Elements, and you can turn off the Tool Box. Now you see that disappears. If you find yourself not using those, it's nice to turn them off and you have more screen real estate for the viewport. But for now, since we're all beginners and we're just starting out, let's leave that up. I'll go back to the UI Elements, meaning user interface, and I'll go down to Tool Box, and bring that back. With the rotation, it's very similar that we can isolate different axes and they turned yellow, and we can click in the middle here, and have a free form option. One thing to keep in mind is because we're working in 3D, watch the x-axis. If I click the z-axis and drag the red one down, now the red one is where the green one used to be. Did you see that? I just undid it. Right now, the green one is kind of going around, and if I bring the x-axis, the red one down, now that's replaced it. Who's to say which axis is which now? Because before I rotated it, the green one was down here, the y-axis. But now because I rotated z, the x-axis is down here. So this option, this kind of view that we're seeing is based on the Object because the Object is rotating, the axes are changing, that's something very important to keep in mind because that'll be important later in animation and stuff. Keep that in mind that because now we're in 3D, these things actually matter, and we can control them in different ways. If we hold down "E" which is the shortcut for rotation, if we hold down "E" on our keyboard, and then click left mouse click, we can drag to the World option. Now you can see the manipulator pop back to have the green going around here like it was before, even though the Object is rotated. What this is saying is, we're now rotating based on the World axes, which never change. So even when we move an object around, you can see the manipulator itself is not changing. We can always have the option, even if an object is rotated weird to isolate based on the World axes, we just need to change that by holding down "E" and clicking and choosing this option. If we go back to Object, you can see it still kept all those changes. Now based on the Object's rotation, we can see that the axes are moving all around. So that's something to keep in mind for later. When we get an animation, this will be important, and I'll explain later in animation why that is important. The other thing for myself I like to do is I like to only ever stay on the channel box unless I'm doing something very specific because you can see this attribute editor here, you can see it says attributed editor right here on the side, it takes up a ton of room. There's a lot of stuff going on and we don't need it, and so I like to keep the channel box open because now we can see the values, we can zero them out, we can click and drag them and then hit "0" and zero everything out. This is way more useful when we're moving stuff around than the attribute editor, and also we can slide that down to free up more space for the viewport. Similarly to the rotation axes being different, the move axes can also be different. Right now, you can see even though the Object is rotated, the axes are pointing relative to the World. So if we hold down "W" similarly, like we held down "E" earlier, if we hold down "W" and left-click, we get the same option, World Object. Now we can see it's following the rotation. It's following the Object axis now. That's two different ways to manipulate the same Object based on its own axis or based on the World axis. So that's important. The final thing we're going to talk about is the Scale. If you hit "R" or you can go over here and click the Scale button or the Scale Tool, we can scale uniformly, and we can also scale on axes, and that's pretty straightforward. We've gotten this far and we haven't moved around anything. How do we move around? We have an object, now let's move around it. I want to zoom into it. How do I zoom in? I can mouse scroll, which I don't use that much. But the other option I have is to hold down "Alt" and right-click and then drag my mouse. You can see I'm doing the same thing. I'm zooming in and out. This is why you need a three-button mouse because now if you click and hold the middle mouse button, I can pan around. Then still holding Alt, if I left-click, I can rotate around an object. So with the combination of these three things, I can do all sorts of moves and zoom in on things, and center get way out here, and I can't really see what I'm working on. I can click and drag and select the thing, I can select it from the outliner, and then I'm going to hit "F." So I hit "F" and I jump back to the selection that I have, and now I'm free to move around again and do all that. You can also get to that option from the View menu here. I can go to View, Frame Selection. One other thing that's very helpful is look at Selection. For example, if we're over here and I'm rotating around, I'm not rotating around the Object anymore. Why is that? That's because my center of interest is somewhere over here and I can't rotate around the Object. If I want to rotate around the Object, I can go "Look at Selection." The position of the camera didn't change, but now it's just rotated looking at this selection, and now I can pivot around that object. That's one way to help control your camera, and if your camera gets too crazy, you can always select it from here. Select camera, which is whatever camera this viewport is, we'll select it. You can also select it from the Outliner because we know it's pers. You can see on here P-E-R-S-P, pers perspective. You can see now we have all the values here, and we can just zero those out if things got too crazy, and of course, now we're inside the sphere because we're at zero World Space. Now you can see I'm rotating from some crazy point out there. I can select my object, hit "F" and now I'm rotating around it and I'm back. That's a quick introduction on how to move scale, rotate, and move the camera around. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 5. Look Development Introduction: Welcome to the second part of this series of Maya for beginners where we will discuss Look Development. If you're a true beginner to Maya, you might not even know what Look Development means and that's what this video is about. If you're familiar with Look Development and the concepts of Look Development, you might want to skip this video. Otherwise, if you're true beginner and you're not entirely sure even what that means, then follow along and I'll show you what we're going to be covering in this section and second part of this larger course. Look Development is a concept in film that you can even find job postings for, they'll call it like a Look Development artist. What they're responsible for, is creating the look of character or maybe even an environment but that involves a lot of different steps. It's not just one skill that you need to have as a look developer and in general, if I had titled this course texturing, it wouldn't have encompassed really what all is involved. It would have shortchanged your understanding on a larger scale what really goes into making an image like the Hulkbuster, for example, which we will talk about in a second. The first part of Look Development is we want to ensure that we have good UV's. UV's basically mean, we are trying to place a 2D texture onto a 3D object and that has a lot of implications because let's take, for example, this example of globes. You see these people making globes and they're not taking one sheet of paper to wrap around this 3D object. They're taking a 2D texture and then trying to put on the 3D object and what they have to do is cut it into these very specific shapes, so that wraps around and each of the seams aligned to each other. You've probably seen this in a map like this that tries to show that distortion. There's even different ways to project a 2D texture onto a 3D object. You're familiar with it, but we can now apply this concept you're familiar with to 3D objects because it's the exact same thing, so that's UVs. The next step is shading and shading is separate from textures because shading talks about the materials applied to an object. An object that has rubber, glass, or metal is going to have different properties. How an object reflects light is what materials are mostly about. We can see here, there's a lot of reflections and this is all metal material. But if we look at something like the Coco movie, we can see the material on their skull is not as reflective, there's not sharp reflections like we get on the Hulkbuster. You can see how hard these lines are and how sharp these reflections are in the metal, which you would expect and on them, the reflections are a lot softer, more diffuse, and that's because the surface on the bone is much more rough. When you have rough texture, the light rays bounce around and they do not reflect back as clear as something like metal that has a smoother surface. There's things like, the transparency of windows and things like that. That's going to be all in the material and in shading, so that's that and then the next one is going to be textures, which we've been talking around. So if we go back to this example of the Hulkbuster, we can see that yes, of course he has materials because otherwise we wouldn't see any reflections and other properties there. But let's take a look down here, look at this little rough area where damage spot happened, or if we take a closer look at some of these reflections, they're not consistent, they're a little dappled and there's some subtle differences all along. Then again over here we see little damage marks, stuff like that and same on Coco we can see, of course they have a material, but they also have textures on their face. There's these designs around their eyes and cheeks and chin and even on their hats and clothes like for example, these lines on a shirt would be a texture. But the properties of the shirt reflecting light and other types of physical properties of the material is shading, but the line itself is texturing. That's the difference between shading and texturing. We will use shading and texturing in conjunction with each other to try to achieve effects like this in the course. The last thing that we're going to discuss is lighting and it's not really the last thing because we're going to do it in conjunction with everything else. Because for us to evaluate shading and texturing, we need to have some light in our scene so that we can see what we're creating. Through this course, we're going to cover all these topics so that we can make compelling images and understand each one of the steps of this process so that we can have confidence that we can make whatever that we imagine for ourselves using these new tools that we are about to learn. I'll see you in the next lesson where we'll begin learning all about UVs. Thanks for watching. 6. UVs - Intro & Planar Projection: Welcome to the first lesson where we're going to be learning about UVs and learning how to create them for ourselves. I'm just going to reiterate again that UVs are incredibly important. You cannot skip this step in any program, in any application of 3D, because every model needs UVs to describe where in space the texture is going to be. We're going to work in the Ghostbusters trap no UVs scene files. You should have this downloaded and you can open up and follow along or if you followed part one of this series of 3D modeling, you should have your own modeled as well. When we're modeling this, we did not take into account UVs. We were just you know, scaling stuff up and down and moving vertices and we do whatever we wanted, and that was fine, we got the model done. But now what we have to contend with is the fact that we distorted the UVs of all these things. Let's take a look at what I mean. Let's create a new square, we going to drag this up. I'm going to open up the UV Editing tools. I'm going to go to the workspace and I'm going to scroll down to UV Editing. The other thing we need to do is go to windows, settings and preferences Plug-in manager. Make sure that we have turned on the unfold 3D bundle and check it loaded. You can also check auto load if you want it to load every time you open marquee. Now that we have those loaded, we can use some of the tools and the UV toolkit here. But so what we're looking at is the actual UV space here in this window, this is two-dimensions, U is along the bottom and V is along the top or vertically, V for vertical. Let me hit "Alt B" and just change the color here so we can see the numbers a little bit better. But you can see that it's basically in a 0-1 space. All of these UVs are in 0 -1. We have this square selected. We can see this represents a folded out version of it into a flat plane. Now, let's select a 3D object like this door rectangle that is a much different 3D object shape. When you click that, it looks pretty much the same. What does that mean? Well, let's turn on this little checker box icon here and we can see what a texture would look like. We can preview what the UVs are how they're represented on 3D object. For this default square, we can see that it's pretty correct. The checkerboard squares are square all along each face and if we select the door here, we can see they're super stretched out and they are really distorted. If we were to apply the same texture to both of these things, let's just say we wanted it to look like concrete or something. The concrete texture would be super stretched out and distorted here. Let me just reemphasize. This is not the most glamorous part of learning 3D but again, you just going to have to learn it because there's no way around this stuff and this is just the nature of 3D. All the models that you create will have to have UVs. Even models that you buy offline may not have UVs with them and you might have to create them yourself, so this is a very, very, very important skill to comprehend because there's no skipping this. Everyone has to understand this and learn it, if you're going to learn 3D, let's take a look at how we resolved the issue that this rectangle has the same UVs as a square. We want this texture to look the same as the square. We want squares wherever we go so that we know that any texture that we apply to this object here is not going to be distorted like this. Let's delete this and isolate, select by clicking this little button up here, one of these door panels, and we'll focus in on it. Let's go to the face mode and select the top faces. I'm going to include the bevel on this. We can actually turn off this texture to make it a little visually easier to select these things. I'm holding down Shift and Selecting and rotating around. Opps, I just de-select that. The one trick to this that we can use to our advantage is the fact that these door panels are facing in the same axis, which is the y axis. It's up and down. We just want to make sure we get these corners as well. What I'm doing is selecting where we want to create new UVs. Just in general, when you're creating new UVs, it's very flexible, you don't have to select the whole object by itself and try to make all UVs at the same time, you can select individual faces and project new UVs just for those faces. Let's go to the UV menu and we can scroll down to Planar. Let's click this option box here. Let's drag this over and see what our options are. We have fit projection to best plain or bounding box, bounding box is what we want. We want to project from the y-axis because that's up and down, but the vertical axis. We want to make sure that keep image width and height ratio is on. Because if we don't have this on and I'll show you what happens. I'll hit apply. It takes this really long rectangle and it tries to make it into a square. It tries to maximize the surface area of the texture, which may be useful if you're painting on this thing in mind, which we'll do later and you want to make sure that if this is an image, this square image is 100 pixels by 100 pixels. You don't want it to be tiny little square on the corner because then that really means that this entire texture would actually only be taking up like, ten pixels by ten pixels in this entire image. It could be useful to try to maximize the space to make sure that the UVs are taking full advantage of the dimensions of a texture. You can see that it's distorting the UVs still, this is not what we want. If we turn on keep image, width and height ratio that will respect the shape of the 3D objects. When we hit "Apply" it's going to make sure that we get the squares that we expect. Because we chose these beveled edges, these squares bleed over that edge. You can see where it stops here because we didn't include this, these are facing another and another axis so we need to select those and do those separately. The one little catch here is the fact that we did the top and bottom faces together. If we look over here in the UV menu and we turn on this little Blue button here, this little Middle button, excuse me, we can see that we have blue down here and this is like a purple so that tells us something is up. If we Right-clicking hover, we can choose UV or UV shell. Let's choose UV shell, that means the whole thing. Let's click the top one. You can see up here that we're clicking which one we're clicking. Let's take a look or clicking the top one here, so let's click that. Now if we hit "W" we can translate that up. Now we can see that we have blue here instead of it being purple earlier. This part is, we can see these are overlapping. These colors just denote to us that these UVs overlapping and if we wanted each face to have unique texture, we wouldn't want this to overlap, so we need to make sure they are in their own space and that's actually called laying out UVs. There's tools to help us do that. Let's select everything. We can go down to arrange and layout and just click "Layout". Now it'll lay everything out accordingly and not have them overlap. The only problem we have now is this thing is red and what does that mean? That means that these UVs, this face, because we projected them together, was actually projected through this 3D object to the backside of those faces down here, so these are flipped and that's what red means. We can get that with this little tool we can turn this on and off. Now we know this is red, we need to flip this around. We can do that with the Transform tools over here. We can scroll down and instead of rotating, we don't want to rotate it, we want to flip it, so let's flip this thing over and now it's blue. We can see everything's blue, they're all facing the right direction, but we still need to resolve these edge pieces. Let's select them and I'm still in UV shell mode. Let me Right-click and I can go to UV and if I hover over it, it'll give me the two options. I'm going to go UV or UV shell right now, if I hover back, we just want to go to faces because we want to select these things individually. I'm going to include the bevels on this axis. We're going to Shift, Select all the faces that are facing the same direction. Let's see what direction that is. I go up and I can see my manipulators pointing the blue means the z axis and I also look down here in the bottom left. This means the z-axis. When we open back up this planar projection tool. Go down here, click there. We can choose z-axis and we have keep image width ratio, height on and hit "Apply" and if we go back to the texture option here, the checker box, we can see that in fact, these are the correct size and dimensions of checker box for what we're after. We did a good job. But again, because we did these together, we'll need to flip this side over. If I right-click and go to UV, UV shell, I can select this side and I can go down and click, "Flip" and all we need to worry about is the fact that they're right on top of each other again. I can select all of these again. Go down to layout, click "Layout" and now they've sorted it appropriately. When I click "Off" I can see everything is blue and nothing is overlapping. We just need to finish up with grabbing these two faces. Let's choose the x axis because that's the way they're facing and hit "Apply "now we have another issue that we can talk about. Look at how small these checkers, these checkerboards are here, and look how big these are. They're not the same textual density. If we apply the same texture to both of these, one would look bigger on one face and smaller on the other and we want to have the same textual density across the UV. You can see there's, it says it right here, textual density, that means pixels per unit. We need to address that. But first let's deal with the fact that these are overlapping and one of them needs to be flipped. If I select off of this, it looks like this one's red. Let's actually just move it up and see if that's in fact the one that's red it is. Go down here, flip it, and now it's blue. Let's select everything and click "Layout" again, now it's all nicely organized. Let's select, let's say we want this type of Texel density. Let's click this and we'll choose Get. You can see that these numbers change over here. We can also choose a map size for it, but we're just going to focus on this for now, so we've gotten the Texel density of this. If we choose this and set it, it's going to change to that exact same Texel density so that we know textures are going to look the same scale wise. We can click this one and hit "Set" as well. Let's just double check that these are also set to that Texel density. They are pretty close but not exact. It's one way to just get everything to be totally exact and same across the same object. That's pretty cool. In the next lesson, I'm going to discuss how to merge UVs back together because now they're all in different pieces. Let's say we want to wrap a texture around this edge. We can see that the checkerboards are no longer lining up. Let's resolve that in the next lesson and learn another form of UV projection. Thanks for watching. 7. UVs - Merge Borders & Cylindrical Projection: Welcome back and let's finish out this top door of the ghostbuster trap. We made our planar projections, but where these seams are that we made between the two different faces that face different axes. The checkerboards don't line up. Let's right-click and go to edge and select the edge that they share. We can see in the UV Editor that there are two lines that are selected as well. We could manipulate those around, but it's going to distort everything. But with that selected, we can see that they share these two border edges. This face, we go right-click, go to face. We know it needs to get flipped around so we can rotated around rather. Let's go rotate it but we can see it's attached to the bevels. See how this gets all distorted. That means there's UVs getting left behind. We need to go grab those two. Those are these little n pieces. Let's select those and now I've included those. Now when we rotate, we won't have that crazy stretchiness going on. Let's move this down towards the border edge that it shares with this face. We can see that it's going to start to line up very quickly. Let's zoom in here and right-click and go to edge. If I choose edge here, you can see that these two edges are flashing and they're the same edge. What I can do is go to cut and sew menu. I'm just going to minimize all this. Go to cut and sew, and you can say stitch together. I'm going to click that and you can see it immediately moves that edge, merged it with that. If I undo that and you can see they're not sharing the same space. This does everything that you want. Boom, there we go. Now when we look at this edge, how it rolls over. Now you can see that these checkerboards lineup and it's a seamless transition from this face to this face. You may also notice that now we no longer have that stronger white line here, which you can see here and that denotes where a cut edge has been made in the UVs. We can identify in the 3D space and we can see it in the 2D space as well. See these border edges here, and that's denoted with this little tool here. We can turn that on and off. It might be a little distracting to have in the viewport, so you can turn that on and off. Cool. Now we've made that seamless transition because we know that we're probably going to see the top a lot more than the bottom. It might make sense to make these seamless transitions on the surface that we're going to see the most. Let's do that for this side. I'll leave that up to you to do that for the rest of the sides if you want, or you could just leave it like this, that's totally fine. Let's take a look at another type of projection, so I'm going to unisolate and select this door. We've been doing planar projections. Let's do a cylindrical projection. If we click this and let's zoom out, we can see that there's a lot of distortion happening. Look at these end caps, they're tiny squares. They are squares at least. Then we have somewhat distorted checkerboard on the cylinder and they're two totally different scales. Let's make new UVs for this whole thing. With the object selected, I'm going to go to UV, cylindrical. With these options, you can see there isn't really any options here. We're going to be stuck with whatever we get with the cylindrical. Let's hit "Apply". Let's take a look at the manipulator that has been created. Don't press any buttons like W, R, or rotate button E, or anything like that. We do not want to hit shortcuts, otherwise we're going to lose this manipulator. Let me hit "Alt+B" to change the background so we can see this manipulator a little better. We can see that it's unique, a weird shape, and it looks like it's going in the wrong direction. How do we address this? Well, if we look over here, there's this little red T for transformation, I would assume. If we click that, we can see that now we get a different option of the manipulator here. We can turn that on and off with this. But how do we rotate it? There's this one blue line that goes around and I can't really get to any of the axes. If I click the blue line without trying to move it, just click at one time, now we get the axes. What we're trying to do is get this to rotate in the direction that we want it to be. We want it to go in this direction because it's a cylinder. We want this cylinder shape to match this one. When we're doing this, we can see the UVs update dynamically and we can try to get them as straight as we can, but there's a straightening tool that we can use later. Do your best, but it's not that big of a deal if it's not exactly up and down. But if this was way off to the side, you'd be able to tell because it's distorting the UVs in a similar way. The UVs are now diagonally stretched. Let's get this vertical. We can see that the end caps are getting squashed. Because if you think about it, everything's getting projected from around this cylinder manipulator. If you're on the end cap here, you're just getting super stretched. Because it's like looking down at this like this and taking a movie projector. I'm trying to project a movie on it. It's going to look terrible on this end cap. That's why that looks terrible. We're going to resolve that later. The other issue we need to have resolved is the fact that this is only projecting on half of the thing. We want this cylinder projection to go all the way around the cylinder. You can see with these white lines where the border of the UV is and it's in a place that's not super helpful because we might actually see this, it's exactly in the wrong spot actually. In general, you do not want to see UV seams if you can help it. Let's put this UV seam on the bottom by using this tool. Let's rotate this down. You can see that white line move as we rotate the cylinder projection. Now it's on the bottom, which is where we may never see it hopefully. The other thing we can do is go back to this T button and get out of the transformation mode. Now you get these little squares over here. See how they pop back here? That's why we want to drag this thing down and we get to wrap the whole cylinder around. You can see all of these squares start to get undistorted and then we can drag it long ways with the green axis button up here. Now we can stretch the whole thing out. It appears that we're making a distorted image here. What I'm going to do is turn off that texture. I'm going to turn that one on and this one on. What this one shows us is where distortion is happening. You can see distortion red and blue. Neither of them are good. We want to see white. That's what this button right here does. It turns it on and off. I turn this one off because this is also showing blue and red, but we don't want to see if the UV shells are overlapped or not right now we want to see if they're distorted, and that's what this third button does. With that selected, I can visually see where does this thing turn white, as like right in here somewhere. I can double check that with the checker box here. If I turn that on, I can see that indeed these are pretty close to being squares. It looks like it's still squashed a little bit. Let me go back in this direction. It looks like in here and click the checker box again. It looks like these are pretty much checker boxes. But of course the end caps are still screwed up in a really bad way. Let's resolve that. Now when we hit any manipulator shortcut like W, now we lost the thing. Really quickly I wanted to show you that you can actually get the manipulator back for the UV cylinder projection. If we click the cylinder projection and we accidentally get off of it somehow, and we click that, we can see that we don't have that manipulator anymore. But what we can do is go over here to the inputs under the channel box here and select the cylinder projection here, polycylinder projection. As we click that, if we hit "T" on our keyboard we'll get the manipulator back. When we have this selected. We can see, and I'm just hitting "F" in the UV thing to frame it up. We can see that's going outside. I'm hitting "Alt+B", so we can actually see numbers again. We can see it's going outside of the zero to one space. Let's go to UV and select all of them. Now we can go to arrange and layout and just say layout. It'll snap it back down to that zero to one space. Even then, sometimes it gets it a little too close to the border edge. With all the UV selected by going here and just clicking and dragging everything, actually scale it down just a touch. Now you can see that texture went away because it was no longer going into that quadrant. I'm going to leave up these end caps for you to do just with the planar projection that we learned in the last lesson. In this lesson we learned how to merge UV borders and how to unwrap a cylinder. In the next lesson, let's look at these cylinders. Now we know how to unwrap a cylinder, but what a pain in the butt this would be if we had to unwrap each one of these things individually. Let's learn how to transfer UVs from one object to another in the next lesson to speed up UV creation, like something like this. Thanks for watching. 8. UVs -Straighten & Transfer: In this lesson, we're going to learn about how to transfer UVs from one object to another, before we do that I just want to finish up on a topic that I didn't completely finish teaching in the last lesson, and that's how to straighten UVs or doing the cylinder projection. It's really hard to get the edges vertical. If you want straight UVs, I can show you how to do that. So I've already given this one PCVs. I'm going to isolate selected. So now we can see it's using the same method from the previous lesson we have this thing already has UVs. The problem is the main UV shell, we got to right click UV shell. The main piece here, I'm not entirely sure if it's vertical. So everything is contact spaced in Maya as far as what tools you have available to you from shortcuts. So because we're in the UV shell mode, if I hit shift, and right click, I have a certain set of options here. But if I command and right click, I have a different set of options. In this case, I want to go from the UV shell to the UVs. So if I command right click, I can say two UVs. So it'll take the current selection, and it'll convert my selection to another type of component in this case, UVs. So I'm going to select that. Now, I have the UVs of the whole thing. I could move this around. I can rotate, scale, whatever I want to do in here. But the reason why I did that is because now when I hit shift, this will be a different type of menu that I saw earlier. Now I can straighten UVs, and hovering over this little gray icon again, of course will give me different options here. So I can straighten UVs, and I'll let go over that, and you'll see them go vertical here, and you do just want to double check it did what I said I was going to do, because sometimes depending on how far off they are from being straight, it might not exactly do what you want, but these look super straight now. So that's how you straighten UVs. Now let's talk about how we take these UVs and put them on every other object similar to it, which is a lot of them. So it will be a real pain in the butt to have to do all of this UV creation for each one of these little knobs. We already have the UVs done, and these are all identical pieces of geometry. So we might as well use that to our advantage. So let's go to the mesh menu, and let's go down to transfer attributes. Let's hit this little option box. This looks super complicated. There's a ton of options here, but let's walk through it. Let me just reset this so it's at the default settings. So vertex position attributes transfer. No, we do not want the vertex position. All we're interested right now are UVs. So we know we don't want that. We know we don't want vertex normals, UV sets. We want that color sets. It doesn't really matter. So the sample space is super important. What this is saying is, how am I going to interpret how to transfer attributes based on the world space, based on this absolute space, based on that grid is zero zero and then everywhere from there is, where it is in this absolute world space? Is at local? Is it specific to the object or the UVs? So these would be if the object was right on top of each other, you'd probably choose one of these two. But let's go with component because these share the same components, its meaning, they have the same number of vertices, the same number of edges, that's the exact same object. So we want to match them based on their components. Now, that's pretty much all we need to do. If we shift, select this next one, and hit apply. Boom, you can see that a transferred UVs, we don't have to do anything. It's such a relief when stuff like this works just that well. So we can't do them on multiple selections. It doesn't understand that, so we will have to do it on an individual basis. But this is still a massive time saver. So we can go through here, and keep hitting apply. Of course, if you remember the shortcut from the previous part one, we're going to hit G on the keyboard. It will pull up the previous command, which in this case is transfer attributes. I can just keep hitting Shift and selecting and hit G. I'm going to finish this up. But before I leave, I wanted to talk about the fact that pretty much everything that we've learned by this point is really enough to unwrap this entire thing. Keep in mind an object like this with zany UVs. How do we approach this? We would approach it by considering the object in isolation. Let's take a look, and think we're probably not going to see the inside all that much. I'm not going to worry about this stuff that's on the inside. We're never going to see that. So let's only focus on unwrapping what we really need, and the way I would approach this even though it looks kind of complicated, all of these is a series of planes. The only unique thing about this one is this diagonal face, because all the planar projections we've done up to this point have been in a very specific axis, but this is on a diagonal. So let me show you how to address that in the next lesson and I'm going to finish doing this stuff. But yeah, thanks for following along, and I'll see you next lesson where we'll kind of wrap up all the kind of UV knowledge you need to have to be able to unwrap an object like this. Thanks for watching. 9. UVs - Final Ghostbusters Trap UVs: You basically have all the knowledge you need now to UV unwrap this entire thing. If you don't want to do that, you can jump ahead to the next lessons and seen files that have this whole thing, UV unwrapped for you, which I'm going to do so that you'll have that to follow along in the shading and texturing courses but I encourage you to unwrap this whole thing. When I was in film school, we were forced to unwrap objects so that it got drilled into us how to do it, and how to be very efficient and understand the tools really well because like I said at the beginning of these few lessons, this is something that you can't skip. Every object has to have UVs. This isn't the most glamorous thing to do, but you have to do. Otherwise, you're not going to have textures on your objects. It's crucial. In this last lesson, I just wanted to cover very quickly odd angles because the only thing that would maybe prevent you from unwrapping this thing at this point is just these odd angles because the cylinder and the planar projection may not work because the planar projection has limited axis. Let me show you a little way around that. Let's select all the faces that are facing the same direction. I'm going to click "Drag" select all of these, and then I'm going to go down here and hold down control and click "Drag" and deselect everything that I had selected through the object. Now I have all of those faces. I may want to grab this top bevel edge around. Hopefully, double-clicking on the next edge, went all the way around. I don't think I'm going to include that next one. I'm not going to include that. What we can do now is go to UV planar and now we can use the best plane option. Now you can see all the axes got grayed out. If we hit "Apply" and we crossed our fingers just try right, you'll see that it did in fact, choose the best plane for this thing and now it's doing at the right angle. The only thing that we would have to clean up about this is the fact that all of these faces, they go all the way around, are facing the wrong way. We need to do that again for these, the ones on either ends, and we can hit "Apply" and it'll maybe not work. What we have at our disposal is this T button here and the blue ring again, little quirky thing. Now we can rotate the plane to be exactly where we want it to be. I'm going to hit "All bb" so we can actually see the plane and we can rotate it around. We can hit "Plus and Minus" to increase and manipulate our size and that's what we got. I'm not too particular about UVs that you're not going to see that much. If you are going to have a close-up show of this object because it is a hero object. I maybe get super specific, but this stuff, sometimes I don't even worry about these things. It all depends on what you're using this object for, how close it is the camera, and all that thing. Basically, some people don't even worry about that stuff. They just go to the select an object. They can be pretty lazy about it. Go to UV, hit "Automatic" into whatever it's got UVs now and it does. If you're going to use a texture software or you're just going to paint over this thing. Some would argue it doesn't really matter because you're not doing that stuff. Basically, if you're ever going to use procedural textures, which means like noise or fractals or something like that. It's going to look super stretched out and weird in these obvious places where there's not checkered squares. Try not to get too lazy about it. Sometimes people just avoid these little nooks and crannies and don't get very specific about the UVs. I think that's okay. Don't let that go too far and just totally ignore getting some type of UVs organized. Anyway, before this piece, I would just keep going through selecting faces and projecting planar UVs onto them. Maybe even sewing up some seams. That's basically it for UVs for the ghostbuster trap, we're going to learn a totally new tool for unwrapping. I think it's a little more useful for oddly shaped objects or organically shaped objects, which is convenient for our skull character, our Mr. Bones character. In the next lesson we will open him up and I will show you how to UV unwrap that. From here on out, the rest of this is up to you, you know everything you need to know to be able to unwrap this entire object. I will see you in the next lesson where we'll discuss completely new UV unwrapping tool and unwrap the little bones character. Thanks for watching. 10. UVs - "Bones" Head: Welcome to this lesson where we will learn more about unwrapping, making seams, and specifically for organic models like a head. In our case, bones is head here, and if you don't have this file, you can find it with the course files. So you can work from your own, from the previous course section on 3D modeling where we created him or her. You can open that up or you can open up mine and follow along. So what I'm going to show you is also helpful for hard surface modeling. So if you haven't finished unwrapping the ghost buster model, that's fine. You can use these tools to actually even help even more. So I wanted to wait and to show you these tools until we got to bones because it's a little more helpful for the organic shapes. So what we're going to do is focus on the head and unwrap that. So I'm going to go to workspace UV Editing like we've done before. I'm going to click the head and we can see the UVs are a total nightmare. With this turned on here, we see we have seams all around the eyes because that's where we did, the kind of edge modeling stuff, and theory. When we're looking at unwrapping a head, we don't want any seams on the front of the face or we want very few seams. The reason for that is very simple because that's where we're going to be looking at the most. We don't want any textures to have any weird distortions around the seams, which is what tends to happen around seams. So with that knowledge but we can deduce is, we need to put the seams back here to unwrap from the back of the head. I'll show you how to do that in this lesson. So let's turn on the texture, so we can see how crazy and psychedelic this is and why we need to make UVs? Let's turn on the border edges and think, you know what, instead of us trying to merge these edges back together and dealing with this mess, let's start from scratch. Make our own UVs with a projection of some kind, and then start making our seams. Otherwise, we'd have to merge all this stuff down for no reason. We could create our own UVs. We can do that by going to UV camera based. It's going to use the camera that you have. It's going to shoot them on there and you can see where it gets distorted based on now that we moved to the camera around, you can see how disorder that is. We can keep doing that, whatever but it doesn't really matter. All we're doing in this step is getting rid of all the seams. So you can see there's no seems now. So for clarity sake, I like to do this from the front view, so we can see that the face in the UV editor more clearly. So let's go to camera base now that we're in the front view and we can see, it's kind of looks a little more like what maybe, we'd expect it to look. So what we need to do is unwrap it because we can see this texture goes all the way through the head. There's all this stretching here on the side. So let's unwrap it with the 3D cut tool here. It's a new tool in Maya 2018, with that selected, we need to go to the edge mode. So I'm going to hold down, right-click "Component Edge". Like I said in theory, "We need to put the seams back here". So I'm going to double-click this seam in the middle and it's going to cut the head in half. But like I said, "We don't want it seems down the middle here, so we need to get rid of all these". We do that by holding down Control and clicking and dragging, and we can try to get rid of some of these seams. This is one way to create a seam, and I'm going to show you another way. You can see I accidentally double-click that [inaudible] holding down Control. This way can be useful and this tool is very useful. But in this case of making a scene that doesn't go all the way around, it might be a little harder to use. So let's look at another method that's more traditional and has worked in every version of Maya. If we take Q and go to selection, let's click on where we want, the edge to start, which is maybe high up on the forehead. Let's go down to the chin where we want the edge loop to end. So we double-click that, it goes all the way around. Now, we've made a selection. We still haven't cut it. So we need to go over here and cut it. So we can go to the Cut sew and click "Cut". The shortcut for that. Also, if our mouse is hovered over the UV editor, we can hit "Shift X" and it will make the cut for us. So we hit "Shift X" where our mouse is over the View port here on the left. It won't recognize that shortcut, it won't cut it. So know that. So now, we have that cut, but if we think about unwrapping this, this isn't going to get us very far. We could actually even try right now. Let's go to Unfold and hit "Unfold". You can see, we actually need to select everything because you have that one edge selected. So let's go undo that and go right-click "UVs" and select everything. Now, it's at unfold. Now, you can see where the distortion lies based on our one cut and what we need to do more and why we need to do more? We can look at the distortion here as well. We can see there's quite a bit along the same and on the more curvy parts of the face. So let's try to reduce this by adding more seems in here. So I'm going to undo this, so we can see it back where we were expecting it to be. I'm going to go back to the edge mode. I'm going to turn on symmetry because with this texture on, we can turn it off and it's easier to see. But if you want to leave that on, it's hard to see. If we wanted to make edge cut here that doesn't go all the way around and click here, and then, I think this is the same edge loop and double-click and cross our fingers. It's actually easier to turn on symmetry and you don't have to worry about that as much. So let's hold down W, left-click and go to Symmetry. You can also get to that where we've learned before and the tool settings over here. Go down to Symmetry Settings and turn that on here. So I like to teach shortcuts a little more, the further we get along and get comfortable with this stuff. So now symmetries on. Now, we have to go to the Center and Shift double-click. So now we have that, hit "Shift X". Now, we made a cut there. Let's go to the chin and do the same thing. So I'll click here and go to the Center and hit "Shift X" with my mouse over on this side, and make a cut there, and then we also want to make one cut that goes across the back of the head. So I'll make it up to the biggest protrusion here which this was a human head would probably be the ear or something like that. So I'm going to hit "Shift X" while my mouse is over here and make another cut. Now, we can try to unfold this again, but I will say, "One last thing I want to do is get rid of this inner part of the nose because we're never going to see it". I could add a lot of distortion to the unwrap because it's all one piece right now. So I'm going to double-click it and then try to follow along an edge that will not be seen by the front. So I'm going in here and following along until I get to that. So I'm going to hit the "Cut" button here or "Shift X" so you can do the same thing. Now, if we right-click, go to UVs, select everything, and hit "Unfold", it should look much better. We can see here as well, the checkers look pretty good. One goofy thing is how this Cauchy head and it's not straight and all that stuff. So if we hit "Shift" and click on any button in here, we can put the Option Box. So the one little thing you can do is click "Pack". So it's going to pack the unfold UVs as it's done. So if I hit apply, it should pop back down to the zero to one, UV space, that we're expecting it to be in. So if I scale this down a touch, they'll get rid of this. This tells me, this is poking out over here a little bit. So always tend to scale it down, just a touch and against that, go off. Now, we can look at the distortion and it should be quite a bit less. There's still some there, but that's to be expected. So this is a really good start and there's no right way or wrong way to unfold a head or organic objects. We're really trying to get the least amount of distortion on this and hide as many seams as we possibly can, so that when we paint a design for his eyebrows, or his mouth, and around his eyes, that it's not going to be distorted. So we have learned how to use the new 3D cut and sew tool, a little bit, but we're going to use this a little more and learn a few more shortcuts with this as we continue to unwrap the body and the next lesson. From there on out, you'll have pretty much everything you need to know about UVs. You can move on to shading in texturing, which is a little more exciting. But thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 11. UVs - "Bones" Body: Welcome back and before I leave you to do the rest of this on your own, I just wanted to cover one more object and the 3D cut tool a little bit just so you get a little more comfortable with it and continue to think about how we're going to be even wrapping everything. When I approach an object or a character like this, [inaudible] we can see that there's a lot of symmetry here. We only really need to do one half from the body and then we can do the transfer attributes like we learned in a previous lesson. Let's take that into consideration, [inaudible] it's easy to get overwhelmed looking at this but in reality we just need to do one half of this thing and we're going to be set. We just need to transfer the attributes. Let's do one more object here just so we get comfortable with it. When I'm looking at this arm I'm thinking where I want to put the seams? I want to put them on the bottom probably because we're going to see maybe his armpit the least and we're going to see the front and this side a lot more. You'd even maybe put it in the back, it all depends. But in general, you try to hide stuff in the armpits and the back of the head and things where people might not see as much. The other thing I want to show you right before we start that is the optimize tool. Think of it like the relax tool and the sculpting tool set when we learn that in the modeling. But instead of for the geometry, the optimized tool is for relaxing the UV's. If we select all the UV's, put drag and select the head UV's, and click "Optimize", we can see how everything starts to relax a little bit. The idea is that it's going to hopefully reduce the distortion on the UV's. That's one other load tool. I'm basically only ever using cut, stitch together, optimize, unfold. Then of course like we learned in the heart modeling, I'm going in and doing the get and set for the textile densities. Objects are relatively similar because if we apply one fractal to everything, those fractal bumps or checkered bumps or whatever noise texture you're doing, they're going to look at different scales. If we want to create one texture, one shader, and apply it to a lot of things, I'm going to make sure it has the same textural density. Those are basically the main things I use. With that said, let's follow through on one more piece and then I'll leave you to do the rest yourself. Let's select this again and we don't want to deal with these seams, I'm going to go UV, Camera based. Now I can make my own seams and I'm going to use the 3D cut and sew tool here. I'm going to Component edge and I'm going to make these on the bottom of the bone here. I'm just going to click that's double click it. Then I'm going to control click, along here to deselect that. Instead of doing the entire end cap here, I want to go around the object. I'm going to other end cap here. I'm going to click "drag" and a little bit here, and control click that piece, and click and drag up here. We see that the checker box change when it takes into account the selection and the cut in the same object, which is one of the benefits of this tool. Instead of having to go back and forth with the UV editor, it will make the selection cut it at the same time. The disadvantage is it can be a little finicky. Depending on your level of patience with this tool and what you're more comfortable with you could use this tool or you can make the selections and then make the cuts yourself using the tools and the UV editor window like we did previously. I'm just clicking and dragging. Actually, I want to go down one more level here so we get all of that shift clicking and then I'm just going to control click the top here. Whoops. Cool. Now that we have that done, one cool thing we can do with this tool still selected we can see we still have the 3D cut and sew tool. We can right click on this go to component instead of going to edge like we have we can go to UV shell. Select this, and then if we hit "D" with our mouse over here, it should unwrap it. That's a really nice shortcut of this tool. Specifically that shortcut won't work unless you have this tool selected. If you're not sure where to put the seams and stuff, it's nice to stay in one tool, hit "D" and then maybe go back to component mode and go into edge keep cutting, hit "D" again is going to reunfold everything again. It's a good tool to experiment with and see where the best unfolding is going to take place. You can see the distortion that had been referring to, especially when something is smooth like this object is when we were modeling we had three. When you smooth something, it tends to distort the UV's worse. This is very important part to understand because it's something that many people run into and never really fix or understand. We can actually fix this. Instead of all of these, all that stretching here at the edge, we can fix this by going into for this piece of geometry, we can go into its attribute editor here by clicking up here and going down to the smooth mesh option. It's the shape node of this piece of geometry. If we click smooth mesh and we go down to the open subdiv controls, we can see that currently we have vertex boundary, we have UV boundary. What typically happens is any smoothing that's done if we hit three or one, it's going to do the same thing on the UV's as it's doing on the vertices. We want to separate that. We want the smoothing to happen on the vertices and not the UV's. To do that, we need to go to the UV boundary smoothing and we need to click on "preserve edges and corners" and watch what happens. Boom. Fixes that stretching issue and it's amazing and also bizarre at the same time that this is not an issue. You may need to fix this later on when you're doing some rendering and lighting and you can see they're stretching on seams. But you may just hold off on this until that time and not get too in the weeds on fixing that because this may never be an issue. You may never see those seams anyways. I'm just going to leave that on for now, but know that that does exist if you ever run on that issue and that's what's happening. Cool. Now all you need to do is transfer the UV's over to this other side. I'm going to shift it click it and you can see how terrible they are and how much time we're going to save here in one second by going to the edit, going to the mesh transfer attributes. Let's just click on this and make sure we have the right options. I'm going to go reset settings. We can see that we need to go to the component mode again. We need to do nothing else. That's it, hit "apply" and it transfers the UV's. We are much happier and we just saved about five minutes. Over this whole model, we could save easily an hour or much more if we don't have to unwrap both sides. In this lesson, you have learned the last little bit of everything you need to know about UV editing I think. You can now unwrap this whole thing yourself or you can skip it, which I also do not recommend. This is all about going through the motions. Otherwise you're not going to learn or remember this stuff. I hope you enjoyed this lesson and I'll see you in the next one. All right, thanks a lot. Bye. 12. Intro To Shaders: Now that we have our UV is done, we're going to take a look at shading, texturing, and lighting. We're going to jump back and forth between all of these because they're all related in some way, shape, or fashion. In this lesson, let's take a look at shading. I have the ghostbusters trap here. As always, if we take a look at the reference, we can see that the materials it's made of are metal. It looks like there's a painted black metal, and then there's this brushed metal that has these streaky reflections in it, and then there's maybe stickers or something on the top, but pretty much it's a metal material all the way around for the most part. Let's take a look how we can create a basic metal shader inside Maya. If we select this object, we can create a new material by right clicking and going down to assign new material. But before we get started, I also wanted to explain how to begin to think about this stuff because it's one thing just to show you the buttons to press, but it's another thing to understand the reason behind this. When we start thinking about shading, we need to consider the physical properties of material. When this started thinking like material scientists and a physicist, how light interacts with surfaces and different types of materials. A rubber tire looks different than a nice glossy finish to the car itself or the window. We need to start to think about why do those materials behave that way and what properties they have that make them behave that way. The first thing we need to do before we start assigning those materials is making sure that we have Arnold loaded in. We go down to Windows, Settings and Preferences, Plug-in Manager, and scroll down to the MtoA bundle. MtoA just means Maya to Arnold. Arnold is a rendering engine, and basically there are different types of rendering engines. Maya used to have one called mental Ray and that shipped with it, and now they've forgotten that one, and now they're using Arnold in their software. You can also buy different types of renderers like V- Ray something you might hear about. Render man as something that picks are made. There's all these different types or renders and they interpret light and surfaces differently. But basically they're all physically based renders meaning they tried to recreate the physics that we see in the real world. This one is made by a solid angle. That's why it says a solid angle as the company that makes Arnold. We have that loaded now. We're going to have the correct options that we need when we go to right-click and say Assign New Material, we're going to have the Arnold options available to us now. We click on Shader, we can see that we can get the aiStandardSurface. This is basically the one we're going to use the most. Arnold tries to condense everything you need into one shader. If you want to see the history of shaders, you can look at the Maya shaders. If we go to the Surface there, we can see Anisotropic, Blend, Lambert, Phong, Phong-E and all of these shaders, or an evolution of what was created in 3D, and they're named after the scientists that created them. The evolution is such that we are now using Arnold. The reason why I want to try to teach the why behind these is because this is going to change in the future. There's going to be a new renderer that comes out or they're going to change the one that's in Maya and you're going to have to adapt. This is part of learning 3D is always staying on top of what's current because I started with mental ray and that no longer exists, so I had to learn Arnold. Again, if we click on the object, right click and go down to Assign New Material, we get all of these options and we can isolate them by selecting them in this left side menu. We can see only their Arnold shaders, and so we want the aiStandardService. When we click that, we can see we get a little more options here that takes over the screen. We can just reduce that down. If we look at all of these aiStandardSurface attributes, we can see each one and they're self explanatory. Arnold has a lot of good documentation on this, but for the most part, they mean what they say they mean. The overall color is going to be controlled by the base color here, and this is where he started thinking about the physical attributes of the material. For example, Specular, something you may have never heard of is IOR, or incidence of refraction. This is an actual scientific number you can look up for different types of materials. You can actually click on this and get different types of incidences of refraction. This is usually dealing with more transparent materials like you can see here. For our purposes, we can just leave it on 1.52 or we can choose something like Plastic, something that's not going to have a ton of instances of refraction. The roughness is like what it sounds. It's going to make a Specular highlight be rough and diffuse. If this is low, the Specular highlight will be very sharp. Just start to think about those types of things and consider also the Presets that we have up here to get you started. If you click on the Presets, you can get all these different types of presets, Brushed_Metal, and all these different types of things that we can use to get a good start, and we can actually use this to see what does Arnold used by default to show this type of a thing. We can also Save our own presets here and use them for later, and they will be down here. Let's just use Brushed_Metal and I'm going to click Replace, which is just off the screen here. I can show that real quick. If we click Presets, we can use Brush_Metal and we can choose how much to blend with our current settings. I'm just going to replace everything and see where it gets us. Again, see what it did. It changed Metalness all the way up to one, so this is a metal object. The Weight is all the way to one and the Colors middle here. We might need to change that later. Let's just isolate this object and let's render it. If we render this thing, we aren't going to be able to see it. We first need to add some lights. In the next lesson we're going to add some lights and learn how to adjust this material a little bit further. Thanks for watching. 13. Lighting Shaders: In the previous lesson, we sign a piece of the ghostbuster trap, our first new material and then dividing up these lessons in this way because we can't really evaluate the shader unless we can see it rendered. Because we can't see reflections in the view port here very accurately and so we need to add some lights and we need to add something to reflect off of as well. Because if we just add one light, it will illuminate the object. But there will be no other things around for it to reflect off of. There are couple new concepts you need to learn as well there. There's something called an HDR. High dynamic range image. Usually on a visual effects set, they take photographs of a mirror ball and it looks something like this. You may have seen this in behind the scenes footage on Game of Thrones or some movie, something like that. But this is what a high dynamic range image is usually created from for visual effects. They get accurate reflections. Because we're going to do in 3D is actually project this reflection inward so that the object in the scene will accept these types of reflections that this mirror chrome ball is receiving as well. It might not make a ton of sense, but maybe it will once we get creating it ourselves. Let's go up here to Arnold and we'll go to lights and you need to be in no specific tab. The Arnold tab is in every one. We can go to Arnold lights and we can just tear that off for now because we're going to create another light in a moment and in Maya, we actually have the option to create a physical sky. What Arnold is trying to do is just make a very generic chrome ball. It's going to be a physical sky. It's going to be just no texture, it's going to be colors and we'll be able to control all of that. But it's just trying to make it so that you don't have to have an actual image every time you want to create a sky or a mirror chrome ball to be able to project reflections onto an object. Let's click fiscal sky, and let's see what render we get just straight out of the box. Let's go to Arnold, Arnold render view and when we first opened this, nothing happens and we need to tell it to start. Let's hit this, "Play" button and we'll say initiate that. That's pretty cool. We actually can see the difference between the two different materials we've applied already, which is this default Lambert, which comes with every single piece of geometry that's created in Maya. Then our new Arnold shader what we can see there's actually reflections happening now and the color is black. We can see this rim reflection here based off of the physical sky that we created. If we were to delete this physical sky, this disappears. There's no light for it to reflect from. Let's try a different light. Let's do a directional light. You can tell from the Arnold lights tab there is no directional light. Arnold uses directional lights, but it's not technically an Arnold conical light. Let's go to the rendering tab here and we can select this image here to get a directional light. Once we click that, we can see we start to get the image back here because we have some light and are seen. If we go into the view port here we can scale up this light. We can see we have a selected here. Let's scale it up and scaling it up won't have any effect on its intensity or anything else. It's just for us to see it a little bit better. We can see the arrows are pointing in this direction, so we're actually illuminating the side We can't see right now. If we just rotate this around, now we can see this object and you can see we are getting some reflections. But it's very obviously one directional and it's not as illuminated as you would probably see in nature as much as when had the physical sky. This is just stuff to play around with that. Depending on how you want to render this or light it or use it, you may need to use a combination of these. We could use a physical light with a directional light. Let's create a fiscal sky again. Now we have this key light and we have a fill light using the sky dome and the terms I'm using key and fill our film filming terms. That is a whole lesson in and of itself regarding cinematography that I won't necessarily get into now, but you can definitely look up or I might create a new course later about that thing. But so basically, this is how you create lights. This is how you start to see final renders and what we're seeing here in the Arnold render view is a real-time updates. It's constantly trying to finish out the render based on the settings we have. There's a lot going on here, but I really just wanted to show that you can click a couple of buttons and already get like a nice a render. The next steps I would take is to finish applying the different types of materials to the object. I can unsolved this, so you can see it here and we can apply this shader to these other objects that it's related to. These are all going to probably have some version of that. For right now we can just apply that same shader we've already used. If we right click and we go down to assign existing material, we can see that this AI standard surface is already created, so we can use it again and if we were to update any of the settings in the AI standard surface attribute editor, like changing the color, it'll change for all of them. Now we can see that update in real time. What I highly, I recommend is to get to this stage and start to drag these sliders around. Because you'll be able to see in real time when each one of these do. It'll be much quicker than me going through and explaining what each one does. Probably much more interesting for yourself as well. Definitely play around with this stuff. You know, roughness is a big thing that will dictate the type of feel that the material has. Subsurface is more for humans and so when you have metal in the sun at all, you can see how it's grayed out. Soon as we take the metal and this off, it'll come back. But I wouldn't really get in the subsurface yet. That's a little more complicated for human characters and other than that, I would play with these other ones like transmission. Again, if we have metal in the sun, you can't really transmit. Some of these will become unavailable with metal shader or if you're trying to get metal. But It's definitely worth trying and going and sliding some things around because that's the best way to learn. An addition to the guidance here in these videos to show you which buttons to press to get to that point. In the next lesson, we're going to delve a little deeper and talk a little bit about textures so that we can get a big picture on textures as well. Thanks for watching. 14. Photographic Textures: In this lesson, I'd like to discuss textures. If we take a look at the reference so we can see that the doors of the ghost-buster trap have this yellow and black tape on it. Some other ways it's representative maybe as paint or something like that. But for us, we just need to get this texture down. Traditionally what you would expect is maybe taking a photograph and somehow bring a photograph in here and using that. That's a file texture, which is totally possibility of something to use. But there are two different types of texturing in 3D. One is called procedural, and the other I guess has really just photographic texturing for lack of a better category. The difference between photograph texture and procedural is the fact that procedural implies that you can update this in real time. You'll begin to understand what I mean when we start to compare the two. Let's first take a look at what using a photographic texture might look like. We could maybe download one of these images. We could try to find a top-down view and projected on their, conversely, we could open up photo-shop and create our own texture inside photo-shop. You could open up photo-shop and create a new texture. You could go in and use paint brushes and do all type of things to create the texture. That would be a little bit time consuming. But at the end of the day, what you would be left with is something that's baked down, meaning you can't change it inside of Maya. You would have to go back into Photoshop and change it yourself, and then save out a new file texture, and then update that file texture, then bring it back into Maya. There's a lot of back and forth that you'd have to do to get this done with the file texture. Let's play that out. Let's do one door with a photograph texture and the other door with a procedural texture and compare the results. In this lesson, let's just focus on the photographic texture. In the next lesson, we'll do the procedural. I'm going to close this down while we're working because sometimes Maya can actually crash when it's trying to constantly update and your adding new things to it. So it's better to just either pause it by hitting the stop button here or but just by closing it altogether and we'll open it up again later. I'm also going to close down this lights because we don't need that. I need to add a new material, a new shader, because we can't apply a texture without a new shader. Because this is going to be unique thing, it needs to have its own shader. I'm going to right-click and go to "Assign new material". In our case, we could really choose anything, but let's just stick with Arnold materials for now. We use an aistandard surface as always. Now what do we do? We're stuck with the same kind of dialog box. It doesn't really appear to be anywhere to put an image file that we have. So we can click these little checker boxes over here and say "Create render node." What we get is a lot more options. What we want is the file option. We want to add a file to this. We could add a lot of different things and we're going to get to this later. What if we wanted to add a texture to this, a photograph, an image file, we want to click "File." Now we have this and we can direct the path to where it needs to go. By default, if we've set our project, it's going to look in the source images folder. In the source images folder, I have the photograph, the texture I just made in Photoshop, and I can open that. Now nothing's happening because we can't see the texture. We need to turn on textures here in the Maya view-port. So I can click "Textured" or I can hit "Six. " Now we see that indeed we've a texture here, and it looks pretty good. But you know what? I don't like the distance at which these black bars are. So what does that process look like? That means I have to go back into photo-shop. I have to adjust the texture. I have to delete this, maybe start over, do all of these types of things, then save out a new JPEG file. Go back in here, go to the shader and go to the color and update this file here or reload it if I saved over it. I can also right click here to see a preview of it. That's quite a bit about come forth and you need a whole different program to do that. Let's in the next lesson, discover the advantage of procedural texturing and how that might be able to help us and texturing this other door and making changes much quicker on the fly and adjustments. Thanks for watching. 15. Procedural Textures: In this lesson, we're going to talk about procedural texturing and texture. The other side of this door panel with a procedural texture. I'm just going to hide this light for now or actually I can go to show and turn off lights. If I was to use Control H to hide the light, then in the render it would also hide it and we would have no lights in our scene. I'm going to click this door panel and again, assign a new shader by right-clicking. Going to assign the material, go to Arnold tab and go down to AI standard surface. Now in the color option when I click this, instead of choosing file like we did when we want them pipe in a texture, we can use really anything. We could use, a fractal, we could use any of these. All of these are procedural textures, and we could actually isolate these by using the texture option here, which Arnold has their own noise textures. We could use the 2D textures from Maya. We're not isolated just to Arnold textures here. We could use anything, and what I want to use here is a ramp. I'm going to click a ramp and we can see that if we click and drag these top little circles, that it is indeed working and this is a V ramp. It's going up and down, it looks like. If we click on this and go to the UV editor, which we know all about UVs now, I'll just close that, we can see which direction it's going in in the UV editor as well. We can see it's going up and down here, and that's the V ramp, if you remember from the previous lessons, V is vertical. There's a couple different ways we could adjust this. I'm just going to delete the history on this as well because we have a lot of history still left over from the previous lessons and now we can get to the shader a lot quicker. If I go back to the ramp here, I can change this to a U ramp and now it's going up and down. But we want a diagonal ramp. I'm going to choose diagonal and it's a very soft transition here. You can see how this is a gradient. We can change that by going to none so that there's no interpretation between the two. We're getting a little bit of fuss here, but that's just because of the Maya viewport. Hopefully when we render this, that should be gone. We can also check that real quick just by going into the Arnold render view and hitting play. Now you can see this is a very hard line, is a straight line. Don't be deceived by what you see here exactly because in the final render, it might be slightly different because this is the high resolution render that we're going for. So I'm going to close that down now that I know that's acting in the way that I want it to. I'm going to change this color to a yellow. So I'm clicking on the selected color, I'm clicking on the white area here. That'll bring up the color history and I can use the picker and actually match this color here that we already have so that I'm being consistent. I can move the position with these. I can add new color here by clicking anywhere, and it will add another color of itself, which I could change if I wanted to. But I want to keep that the same and start repeating these pieces here. So you can see how very quickly I can just add new lines, I can change the thickness of them, I could even animate these things positions if I wanted to, so the ramp itself would animate. But very quickly you can see, you know what, if you change your mind, you don't have to go to a new program. You can procedural change this so that it will update as you want it to. So that's quite powerful when you compare the two. You can also combine them in certain ways and you can do a little more advanced things. But just for now, it's important to understand the concept between using a file which is baked down and you cannot adjust and Maya. It's just using this file and the difference between a procedural texture, which if you click on this and go to, there's all these options and we can actually change it. We can actually add noise to it. We could do all these different types of things to it. I just want to show you the power of that and encourage you to explore the different procedural textures, the 2D textures, the fractals and we're going to dig a little deeper into those in the next lessons as we refine the shape. But in the meantime, I'm going to encourage you to finish out the texture here one way or the other and let me just show you one rule, quick trick. I'm going to go with the procedural for this example, and I'm going to go assign it real quick. I'm just going off of the assign existing material and I'm just going off the screen just a touch to get that one. This is an accurate to the reference. They should be going in the same direction like this. What I could do is actually change the UVs. So if I open the UV editor and I can just grab the UV toolkit and dock it here on the side. I'm going to reduce this down so I can see what's happening. We can use the transform attributes to rotate this around and see where it needs to be to line up. I can just drag this. I'm trying to get this to the correct length and lines that aligns up with. It appears that this may get cut off at the bottom here because its diagonal doesn't continue exactly right. What we need to do is tile all this image in a different way so that these will line up exactly as we need them. So I want to introduce you to a another component of textures, which is the texture placement. If I go to the object mode, select this, and we select these, one of these two. This is basically the input and output of this node. We can go to the ramp and see its place 2D texture here. We can see the placement of the texture, and instead of adjusting the UVs, we could actually adjust it from here. But because they're using the same texture, we can't really rotate it because it rotate both of them. We move the UVs, but we still have this problem, and that's just because it's wrapping it the wrong way. We want to mirror that. Now we have that one's done and we no longer have where it's cutting it off because it's mirroring the bottom instead of repeating it. Because you can see what it's trying to do is start back up from the top basically instead of mirroring the bottom. If we mirror the bottom, will get rid of that little thing. But so this is how we can procedurally texture the door panels to have the same file texture. We can adjust this through the shader. We can also tweak the UVs of this thing. So these line up or they don't line up, however you want to be, add realism by offsetting some things a little bit and not making it look too perfect. But yeah, that's a good introduction to procedural texturing, why that's important. We're going to look at using procedural textures more in the next lessons to add a little more realism to the shaders that we have already assigned. Thanks for watching. 16. Scene Adjustments: In the upcoming lessons, we're going to continue to shade this ghostbuster trap with a little more detail. But before we do that, we need to adjust the scene a little bit. If we go to the "Arnold RenderView" and we hit "Play", we can see that everything looks black and it's hard to really tell what's going on. If you look over here, we can't really see where the edge is on this part of the model. To remedy this, we need to make a ground plane. To do that, we can go over here to the poly modeling shelf and click the "Plane" and we can just scale this up. I'm going to scale this up quite big and the other thing we're going to do is add some subdivisions to this, then we can add a deformer. What I'm creating is basically what is called an infinity background and it's used all the time in photography. If you've watched the modeling part of this course, you'll know how to use the bend deformer, so I'm not going to go into a ton of detail on that as I'm making it. But you can follow along here just visually. The reason is to make this background, we need something for the model to reflect off of, for light to bounce back off of onto the model, and so that we can see the reflections and all that thing and the model. Now that we have this, we're going to maybe increase the curvature just to touch more and delete by type history to get rid of the deformer, and we can just rotate this in whichever way we want. Push it in space back here. I'm going to put this on its own display layer so that we don't accidentally grab it. I'm going to turn off the grid now that we have a ground plane. If we go back into the "Arnold RenderView" and hit "Play", we can see that the model looks way different than it did before, because it actually has something to reflect off of and for the light to bounce back on to. Now we can see the edge of the model itself where we couldn't before. The other thing we need to add here before we move forward is just two things that might help us in the future. I'm going to create a sphere here, drag it over, and make it a little smaller here. This is done in look development, where you basically create a chrome ball, I'm going to right-click and go down to assign the material, create a standard surface and use the chrome preset here, and we're going to hit click "Replace". Then I'm going to leave this on the Lambert and when we go into the "Arnold RenderView" and hit "Play", we can now see these reference balls basically, so that whenever we're making shade adjustments, we have a reference point of okay, this is what it should look like in the scene if there is no reflection. This should look like if it's totally reflective. When we're making adjustments to our shaders, we can visually reference the two extremes here and dial it in based on what's possible with the lighting that we have and the environment that we have in the scene, which right now is just a simple ground plane. But so these couple of little adjustments will make our life a lot easier in the coming lessons where we're going to add more detail and create some more shaders for these pieces here. Well, thanks for watching, I'll see you in the next lesson. 17. Update: Reconnect Missing Textures: If you have a Maya scene where your texture file paths are broken, let me show you how to fix it. Go to "Windows", "General Editors", go on to the "File Path Editor". This is going to be the easiest way to see what textures are broken by the red x here that shows us there's a lot of problems. Obviously, the first thing we know we have a problem because I had textures enabled and in the viewport no textures were showing; it was all gray-shaded. So that's obviously the first sign of the problem. But this will actually show us which ones are really broken here. I'm going to choose one. You can see here that most of them share the same source folder. It's called source images. I'm going to click one and go down to "Auto Resolve". Then I'm going to browse the folder, the base folder that they all share; the source images folder here in this case. I already have that file paths which we're going to paste it in. I don't want to copy the files, I just want to leave them where they're at and just redirect the file texture paths there. I'm going to uncheck "Copy Files" because I don't want to make a copy and put them somewhere else. Then I'm going to click "Auto Resolve". It's going to take a second. Then we can see that it has resolved that file path. We can just go through each one of these, or we can select a lot of them that we know share the same file path and say "Auto Resolve". We already have those settings set up. That will automatically turn those into the green checkbox that shows us that those are working and we can see the texture is starting to pop in here. You can see there's a couple more that I need to reconnect. That's essentially how you do it. The other thing to keep in mind is, if you have set your project that the file texture paths should be relative to the source images folder because that's where you should be saving your texture files. But in this case, this was a project that was shared over multiple people. There was another root directory outside of the prod set project. This was a unique case where we were always going to have to repack these every time it changed hands between people. But just keep in mind, this is the importance of setting your project before you start so that you know when you reopen the file, all the file texture paths will be relative to that project folder that you set. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time. 18. Hypershade Intro & Fractals: Now that we have a good overview of what shaders are, what type of textures, there are procedural and photographic, and what that means, and we have our scene setup, let's dive into the meat of this course as far as shading goes and create these shaders for this ghost buster traps so it doesn't look all chromed out and crazy-looking right now. Let's jump into this shader, which is the one that we've already created. One thing I'm going to do to make our lives a little easier is to actually turn on feature here, which is we can actually control the 3D view and the view port so I'm not having to constantly move this to the side and then navigate in here and the move this back. I can go to Window 3D manipulation, and now you can see that I can actually rotate around in here and it will also update the view port behind it so that I'm not having to switch back and forth between the two views in this course. I'm going to delete the history on this so that we can get to the shader a lot quicker and the tabs up here. The main thing that's wrong with this is of course the reflection. It's way too reflective. Of course, yeah, it's a metal material, but if you think about like a painted metal and consider the two surfaces, if you used a microscope, chrome piece of metal is going to be pretty smooth, and a painted material is going to have all the grooves of the brush stroke and it's going to look a lot more rough on a microscopic level. That microscopic level actually impacts how the light bounces off of this surface and makes it reflect very accurately or more roughly. You can see it's almost like a perfect mirror because we can see these reference balls in the side of the object here, which we can also select individual objects from the Arnold render view. With that selected, I'm also going to delete the history on that one so we can get to it a little easier. So we want to increase the roughness and that will get us pretty far. But we also want to make the color a lot more dark, and we've already gotten pretty far just with those two small adjustments. The other thing to consider, once we start shading things are the textures that we are going to use. Since we know procedural textures are pretty powerful and we don't have to go on to any other program, let's use those to add more detail. If you look at the surface of this thing, it's pretty smooth and it looks perfect, and anytime in CG, you're always trying to fight against perfection because whenever you create a surface or a sphere, it's going to be perfectly round, and the shaders and textures are always going to be perfect. We want to break this up a little bit, and to do that, there's a couple of different ways that we could do it. We can start to add textures to these attributes by clicking the checker box. The first one that we could try is a fractal on the roughness. That'll break up how the surface is maybe shiner in some spots and rougher in others. Let's click this checker box and we get the render node open, and we can go down to fractal here. This is one of the most common ones that I use. I rarely use pretty much anything else besides opening of a file and using fractals. Sometimes I'll use noise but not really. Ramp is also very useful. But for the most part, I don't really use any of these besides fractal. You can get a lot out of fractal, and that's what you'll learn in this lesson, and the next one. It's very versatile. I'll click that, and we can see that something happened, but we can't really tell what. We need to isolate this fractal, so we can actually see the texture. If we right-click here, we can see it's black and white and there's lot of stuff going on, but we can't really see that here because it's being applied to the roughness channel. For us to see that, we need to open up the hyper shade, and the hyper shade is something new that we haven't opened yet. It's this little button up here. If we click that, it'll open up a new window, and your hybrid shade might look a little different because I've closed down some of the windows that I don't use that often. You can go in here and click these X's and close down what you don't want and open them back up here. For example, I believe I've closed down the material viewer so we can get that back, and we get doc that in this window, like so, and I believe this might be closer to what the default view is. But I like to see it in the actual view that we're doing and we might have more materials later, so I'll just close that one down, but you can get back to all those things right here and then dock them in this window if you want. You could also dock this in the view port where right next to the view port that is. But for our purposes I'm just going to leave it open so we can slide this around so you can see everything. Let's take a look at how we can isolate the fractal here because we can't see it. What we want to do is map the shader that we've created in this window here, and to do that, we need to have an object selected, and we need to click this little button right here that has graft materials on selected objects. We have our object selected, let's graph those materials. For our purposes, what we've dealt with so far has just been this object basically, and it's displaying all this information that we've already seen over here as displaying in a different way. We can see the input connections and the output connections. It might look pretty complicated right now. But in reality, you've already seen all of this. It's just displayed a little differently over here in the attribute editor. This is just another way to visually see this stuff in a little more quickly select different nodes. Each one of these things is called a node, and so basically the fractal is being piped into the roughness, and the fractal has a 2D texture placement node, and that just basically says, ''Hey, this texture is going to be placed on UVs in a certain way. It's going to repeat so many times it's going to be mirror, that's going to whatever else.'' It looks more complicated than it is, and you've already seen all this information, but just in a different format. Don't get too overwhelmed with this view yet or ever. With that selected, we can actually go to this little button in the Arnold render view, and isolate that texture, which is like a lifesaver because this is a newer thing and they haven't had this for forever. Now we can see what we're actually doing with the fractal texture. If we can turn that on and off here, and the main thing that we want to consider is when we piped in this fractal, and it's a black and white image. If you notice closely here, it's actually outputting not the color but the alpha. Because the specular roughness will only accept one value and a color is combined of red, green, and blue. When you try to output a color, it's looking for three things to output into. But because roughness is a one value, we can see by the slider on the shader itself, it's not like the color value. This would have RGB, but this is a single value. Just like roughness is going to be a single value. It's outputting the alpha and the Alpha, if you're not familiar with images in Photoshop and all that thing, Alpha just means transparency. The Alpha is being interpreted as roughness. But the Alpha is pure white basically. We're looking at a black and white image, but it's using the Alpha, so it's not really doing what we wanted to do. We want to use the color information. We could map in just the R and just choose one of these three channels, and as soon as we do that, you can see this update. Now we get to see that fractal affect the roughness. The one disadvantage of using just a single channel is that we do not have access to global controls to increase or decrease this channel. But if we use the Alpha and we just pipe the Alpha in, again, it'll go back to not being visible. But if we pipe that in, we actually have these Alpha gain and alpha offset controls. This is the key here. Remember this, Alpha is luminance. When I click that, and that basically will say, ''Hey, use the Alpha channel or use the luminance of the channel for the Alpha." So because it's just black and white, you're basically just copying all this color information because there is no color. It's just a value from zero to one. It's piping that into the Alpha now. That's the trick to do here. The reason why we're using Alpha and not just the R channel or the green channel and the blue channel is because we have these two sliders here, and we can control with one control the effect of this texture Whereas if we use the red channel, there is no red channel controller here. That's why we need to use the Alpha channel for the fractal. I know that might seem a little complicated, but read, watch this, create this yourself. Follow along so that you ingrain this in your mind. Because this is going to come up again and again, and fractals are something that's used quite often. You want to get comfortable with understanding why this is the case. Why we're using the Alpha. Use the R if you want. Use a G, it doesn't really matter because it's just black and white. Whichever color channel you use, that's fine. But then you'll get stuck into a position where you're like, ''I just want to dial this back just a touch,'' and then you'll be totally stuck because there is no control like that on the fractal node, and that's why we're using Alpha. Hopefully you understand that now. But so look this, we added a ton of detail in one node. If we go back, we can see that now this object doesn't look perfect like it did before. It looks maybe a little worn and and what not. In this lesson, we've gone really far. We've learned a lot. We learned about the hyper shade. We learned how to create a little more texture here, and in the next lesson, we're going to create an entirely new material and maybe tweak this fractal a little bit. But the next thing we're going to create is this brushed metal shader here that you can see in the reference. I'll see you in the next lesson where we'll try to create this Shader. All right. Thanks for watching. 19. Brushed Metal & Bump Maps: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to learn how to create this brush metal shader that's on these panels here. You can see it in the reference. This is a very subtle streaking texture here. So let's jump in and start to create it. We'll right-click on the object. Actually, before we do that, let's just delete the history so we can access the tabs a little easier here, as we've done before. Let's right-click go to assign the material, and go to the Arnold shaders and choose Standard surface as we've done before. Let's rename this time so it's easier to apply to the other surfaces later. We're going to call this brush metal, and hit Enter to make sure that is applied. Scroll to the top here, and let's turn on the Arnold Render views so we can see the changes we're making. I'm going to go ahead and hit play here. We know that this object is metal, so we can at least increase the metal to start. There's a new concept we need to cover, which is called anisotropy. If you look at reference of anisotropic reflections, they are basically saying all reflections are happening in one direction. It's this streaky pattern in metals that happen. That's why its own little control here because that's a very specific type of metal and type of reflection that occurs. That looks like what's happening here in this ghost buster trap. It's an anisotropic reflection. Let's increase anisotropy, and let's increase the rotation just a little bit so we can control actually rotation of the reflections. So depending on where you want that highlight to occur, you can control with rotation. I'm just going to get it somewhere we can see it on a three-quarter angle. The other thing that we need to cover is these bumps here. There's long streaky bumps, and we can control that by a bump map. A bump map is exactly like what it sounds like. It is a map or texture. Anytime you hear the word map, that means a texture basically, usually. A bump map is basically saying, take the color values from 0-1, black and white values, and say that zero goes in on the surface and black goes out, or so the other way around. I always forget. But basically it's just using that value information of black to white to say, this goes in or out. It doesn't really matter as much, usually because bump maps are only on very subtle things, because bump maps do not actually deform geometry. Displacement maps do, and that's a different topic for another time. But bump maps are only used on very small detailed things that are going to change the silhouette of an object. So if we added a bump map to this and we looked at the silhouette, basically this line back here, the bump map basically fix this effect and makes it look like there's these deep cuts that are streaks in this thing. But then when you get to the silhouette, it just still as a flat object. There's not the streaks on all go all the way to the edge. So anyway, bump maps are just for subtle stuff, and I think that's perfect for what we're going for. So let's create a bump map by going down to geometry, and clicking on the checker box here next to bump mapping. Let's create a fractal. When we first create it, the default values are pretty aggressive. The bump depth is at one, and that controls. Based on these 0-1 values that we're getting from the bump value, which you can see there's something piped in here and that's going to be the fractal that we selected. If we right-click that we can see it just looks like a normal fractal, it's not streaky like we need it, so we need to adjust that. But the amount that's being bumped here, the surface looks very rough. But if we look at the silhouette, the silhouette is the same. If we're looking down here it's just a straight line. That's why I'm saying the bump map is for very subtle effects. I'm typically only using 0.1 or 0.01 or something like that. You can also see it increases render time. There's a lot more things it's having to calculate light bouncing around. So the more subtly effect the quicker it can go usually. I'm just going to increase that so we can actually see the effect while we're working on it. The other thing that we can do is of course isolate this using the Isolate button here, or we can select it from the hyper shade just to choose the fractal itself. With the objects selected here, we can click this button to graph everything out. Now again, select the fractal, and now we can see the fractal. We need to streak this out somehow, and one way to cheat it and hack of the nodes that we have here is by increasing the UVs in one direction. So you can see when I click that, now everything went dark because it's isolating something that's really not visible. This is just a node with information about the UVs for this texture, how it's going to be placed on the object. We need to select the fractal and choose that place texture node from this tab actually. So now it'll keep this in the Arnold Render view. If we go down here, we can see repeat UV, and if we hold down command on our keyboard, on a Mac, and middle mouse drag on this value, we can increase or decrease that. We can basically create these streaks ourselves with adjusting and distorting the UVs for this texture. The other thing we need to effect is the fact that these lines aren't super solid, they go dark and bright. We need to adjust the fractal, and we can do that in the amplitude, even though this goes just a one. You can see the amplitude controls the contrast here. Even though this goes to one, you can type in new values here. I'm going to type in a five, something big. Now you can see this definitely has a stronger effect. We can decrease the ratio as well, which is basically like how detailed this thing is, and just go way down with that. We can also do that for the frequency. We smooth out those as well. Now we can get an idea of how aggressive, and maybe we can increase the amplitude even more. Let's just see. Who knows what the best thing to do here is? It's all just experimenting. That's the beauty of Arnold Render view, and isolating these things is seeing this in real time. I think we need a little more distortion here. So let's increase this to get some more lines going down this thing. That looks about like the density we saw in the reference. Now let's turn off the isolate, and we can see we have these streaks now. We used procedural texture that we can change in real time inside of Maya, and that's super useful. This was a photographic texture we're using for a bump. It'd be really time-consuming to go back and forth between Photoshop. Let's go to the bump and decrease this back down, now that we can see the effect it has. I'll do a 0.1. That looks pretty good actually. I'm going to zoom out and going to apply this to the other objects. I'm going to click these shifts like the other one, and I'm going to right-click and go to the Assign existing material, because we named it, we can easily identify it. We can see that maybe for this angle, it's way too strong. This one looks right, but that one doesn't. I think it's a lighting issue, and depending on the angle of the object to light, it might affect it. Let's say that we like this for these two panels, but we don't want to change all of them together. Let's create a new shader for that front panel there. So in the hyper shade, we can go down and see the airbrushed and brushed metal, and we can go to edit, duplicate the shading network. So basically make a copy with all of the inputs, and it will create a new fractal and all that. Just so you know as well, it's keeping track of all these things you're making in each one of these tabs. So you can see fractal, 1, 2, 3. You can get back to those there as well and reuse them even. If you wanted to use the same fractal over and over, you could do that. But they don't cost anything, and I encourage you to use as many as you need. Now we just need to apply this duplicated material to this one. I'm going to middle mouse drag it over the object. Nothing changed because it's the same duplicated Shader. But with this object selected, I'm going to graph just that one out. Let's go to the bump, and maybe reduce that down to 0.001. That fixed it. That was quick and easy. That actually worked better than I thought it would. So yeah, that's how we create a brush metal effect. Again, we can go in and add a fractal to the roughness. I think that's definitely worth looking at, or just increasing the roughness just a little bit. Let's see what that does. You can see it can quickly get out of hand as it's trying to references, spreading out the reflection. So depending on how you want this to look, you can continue to adjust those settings from the attribute editor and with the hyper shade. So in this lesson, we learned a lot. We learned about bump maps mostly, and how to control anisotropic reflections. In the next lesson, we're going to continue creating the shaders for this object. I look forward to seeing you there. Thanks a lot. 20. OBJ File Format & Fix "Bones": Welcome to this lesson where we will quickly clean up the bones model, so that we can use it in later lessons. We're going to learn about a new file format called OBJ. One quick thing I wanted to note, is that there was this artifact that was created, I'm just going to turn on "Selection Highlighting", it was turned off on a previous scene. When I transferred the attributes, it created this kind of weird artifact where, they have the same shader, but this one obviously is much more white. If I select all of these things, I'm going to first try to remedy this by, deleting the history. We want to do that with everything except for the spine, because if you remember, we have the spine is attached to a wire deformer, so we want to keep that, we don't want to delete the history on that. Let's just select these things and I'm going to show you a little script right now to select the hierarchy. Because if you see, we just select this top group, we didn't select the hierarchy which includes everything below it. There's a little thing we going to type in and we going to say select dash hi, which means hierarchy, and as long as it's MEL, which is the Maya expression language, we can hit "Enter" and it will select the hierarchy of everything. Now, when we scroll down, we can see we actually selected everything in here and it just saves a ton of time. We don't have to go through and click every single thing. Now, we can go "Edit", "Delete by Type", "History", and this isn't going to fix it, but I just want to show you that's a quick little thing to do. Another quick thing is, when in doubt export these as OBJ's, you can see there's one down here too. If I was to transfer attributes again, let's go "Mesh", "Transfer Attributes" and it didn't do at that time but let me show you real quick. I'll just duplicate this and move this to the side and "Transfer Attributes" and it should do it here. See how it turned that white. I don't know why transfer attributes is doing that, but let's just select everything that is white. I like to show troubleshooting stuff because, this is reality of learning 3D. I'm also going to teach you, a new file format. Object file format or dot OBJ, is something that we need to load in first to make sure that we have that under the "Plug-in Manager", and you go to objectExport.bundle make sure that's loaded. Otherwise we won't have that file format when we go to "File", "Export Selection". We see we have the OBJexport option here and we can just say ribs re-import and this one I'm just trying to get rid of whatever crazy histories happening here. Export it as an OBJ. OBJ is not going to remember shaders, it's not going to remember any kind of history. So I'll export it as an OBJ and then I'm going to re-import it. Hopefully, you can see it tries to maintain the material here, dot MTL, but we just want the dot OBJ, we just want the object. When I import that it's saying basically there's multiple objects, it's going to bring it in as one, that's fine. Now, if we solve this, we can see that they are not white and they all have the same Lamba share they did before. I'm going to hit three just to zero that out at. What it looks like is the normals are possibly reversed. Let's hit one and let's separate all of this. I'll go to "Mesh", "Separate" because it was all one piece. I'm going to delete the history again. Now, if we hit three and we reverse the normals, it should work. Yeah, it looks like because we scaled probably in the negative, it reversed the normals on us. We just need to go to "Mesh Display" and reverse the normals, so it's not inside out basically anymore. If I hit three here, this might be the same thing and it is, so it looks like that might have in the problem to begin with. I just want to show you that kind of troubleshooting thing and get these to where they need to be now. Let's un-solo this and let's just replace the new mesh with the old mesh. I'm going to select these three and delete them, and then grab these three and put them back in the group by middle-mouse dragging them under this group and we can rename them if we want. For now, I'm just going to leave it because we've already mirrored everything and that's all fine. Let's see, this is the right side. I'm going to "Shift", click, so it's going to grab the next thing below it and basically select through it. Now, I can see it's in this group and I'm going to "Shift", click it again and now it's going to switch this selection, so now I know I can go there and then delete that one and then do the same thing for these two. I'm going to "Shift" select those two so I can see it's these, then if I "Shift" select, it's going select the ones below it. I can frame those up and outliner head f and then delete those, and then grab not those three, grab these two and middle-mouse, drag them into the correct ribs group here. Now I can just get rid of that. So now we have the correct gray scale there's no wonkiness going on. In this lesson, we fixed the bones, couple of pieces geometry, and in the next lesson, let's get into three Paint and I will show you how to paint the face. Thanks for watching. 21. "Bones" 3D Paint Tool: In this lesson, we're going to learn about the 3D Paint Tool. If you go to your Rendering tab here, you can see the icon right here, 3D Paint Tool. You can also get to it from Rendering, Texturing, 3D Paint Tool. For this lesson, I intentionally chose to take a break from the ghostbuster trap texturing to texture this because I think it's going to be super fun to learn about the 3D paint tool with this head, so that we can do the Dia De Los Muertos type of designs on this head. So, Google some images, get some inspiration and open up this in file Maya, and let's get started. I'm just going to zoom in here. The other reason why I wanted to start with this as well, is because it also has the Lambert shaders. If you right-click and go to Assign New Material, you can see all the Maya surface materials are right here. Anytime you make anything in Maya, it's going to give it the Lambert1 shader. You can see that written right here, Lambert1. Every piece of geometry that we have is a Lambert1. Currently, the 3D paint tool does not work with Arnold shaders. We have to have a Maya shader assigned for the 3D paint tool to work. That's why I switched over to this one because it still has all Lamberts and the ghostbuster trap has a bunch of Arnold shaders on it now. Say your texturing or shading and have all these Arnold's shaders, you could revert to Lambert shader and then from a Hypershade bring in that Arnold you had been using. But just for clarity sake, let's just start from scratch and have a new Lambert on this because I don't want to affect the Lambert shader that's applied to everything else. Let's click "Lambert" and now we can click this button and go into the 3D Paint Tool. It says we have no file texture assigned to the current attribute. If you look, I'm going to hold down B and then I'll mouse drag, our paintbrush has a big X on it. That's a sign that we need to do something and we got this little error here. Also I should say that errors that show up in yellow are just warnings, they're not errors. Anything that shows up in red is actually an error. We know that we just got a warning so there's something else we need to do. Let's go to the tool settings of this paintbrush. The first thing we need to do is go to assign edit textures because it doesn't know where to save the texture we are about to create with a paintbrush. We go to Assign Edit Textures, and we can change the size of the texture. I always like to go pretty big because you can always scale down the texture later, you can ever scale it back up. Let's go with 4K, and I'll hit "Assign Edit Textures." Now you can see the X is gone from this and we can actually paint on this now. I'm going to flood this with a color that is not totally white, it has some yellow in it and it's a bone color. Using the Flood tool here, I can flood the entire object with that. I've chosen a little red color here, I'm going to make some designs around the eyes like the flowers that you see in a lot of these designs here. These circle areas. So I'm going to start with that base color and go around this. If I hold down B I can change the size, and there are different brush types here, I'm going to go with the harder edge brush and start painting. You can see that my rotation it's going to be hard to navigate because I'm rotating not from the pivot of the head. I'm just going to get out of this tool for a second and I'm going to go to View, Look at Selection. Now it's pivoting from the head. That'll make navigating around much, much easier while I'm painting. Now I can go back into the tool and with paintbrush selected, I can start painting. I'm going to start painting and let's say I make a mistake, whoops, I do something like that, well, I could use the erase tool. Let's go to the erase and I start erasing. That works pretty well. What it could do is actually erase the flood that you have. In that case, you can actually just use the color of the flood and paint over it. When you use the paint tool, it'll do the same thing. You have those two tools at your disposal if you mess up. You also have these other tools here, you can smear things and to blend colors together. We can also blur this out. In case the edges are too sharp, we could blur that out. I'm just going to flood the paint again one more time and go back to the color that we had and go back to the normal paint. I'm going to get to painting and I'm going to speed this up, and I'll see you in a second to show you what it is we need to do to complete our texture so that Maya knows how to use it. Now that we have some texture that we like after we've gotten done painting, we can save this out as a file by going down to Save Textures. If we click this button, we may or may not get an error. This is just about some little preview thing. But if we click this little button down here, that's called the Script Editor and we can see everything that's been happening in Maya for a while. If we look just above the error that it gave us we can see it says saved and it has a file path and it says, JPEG right here. If we go to that in Photoshop, we can go to File, Open, we can see that file. This is the importance of setting your project when you learned about this in the first part of this course, and let me just reiterate it again. If you haven't set your project, you have to go to Set Project and choose the main folder you want to set it as. Then when we go to Open things or Save things, or in this case when we're creating textures, it's going to save it in the correct place. If we look in Photoshop, we can see that it is under the Maya folder that we had set as a project, the Source Images Folder, and then there's 3 Paint Textures, and then it has the object that we painted on are the scene file name as the folder and then the object name are the shape of that geometry. If we hit "Open" now we can see we have this piece of texture in Photoshop. We can use this as a guide or we could repaint this in Photoshop if we prefer brushes in Photoshop, or we can continue to paint the rest of this. But you might say, "How do we know where the other eye is?" It's over here somewhere. Well, we can export the UVs as a template so we can see how we can paint textures in Photoshop. Let me show you how to do that right now. If we go back to Maya and we click on the "Object" let's go into Object Mode and select it. We can go to the UV editor window by going to the Modeling menu and going to UV Editor. You can see we have our UVs from the first part of this section. If we go and select all of them, you can see that indeed, this makes it possible to paint textures. If we did not layer UVs out in this way, then it would be impossible. If UVs were overlapping each other and all that mess, it wouldn't be possible to do this. Now you can begin to see the importance of having properly laid out UVs when it comes to texturing. To get this into Photoshop, we can go to Image, UV Snapshot, or we can click this little camera button right here. That'll open up the UV snapshot options, and we can export this as a JPEG to the images folder. Again, because we've set the project, it's already populating what directory to save these things in. We want a JPEG and that's fine, edge color, let's change the edge color to black and let's Apply and Close. Let's save over the snapshot because that already made this earlier. I'm going to open this up in Photoshop, go to File, Open, and we can go to the Maya directory that we had set as a project, we know it saved it in the Images folder and there's our UVs. Let's hit "Open." Now, we can see that actually because we set it to black, that didn't work. So let's just save that to white and we can actually invert this and Photoshop. I am going to overwrite that with white lines now, and let's reopen this. File, open. The lines are just super thin. I'm just Command A, Command C, Command V, pasting it in here, and because they're both 4K textures that overlaps exactly. Well, we can't see beneath it. This isn't really Photoshop lesson, but I'm just going to show you a couple of things. Let's just hit this to "Screen" and now we can see there's actually white lines here. But because our background color is so bright, let's actually invert that. We can go back to normal and we can see if we hit "Command I" we can actually invert that. Now if we set this to Multiply, we can actually get black lines. We can see if we make a new layer here and we start painting, we can actually affect this thing inside of Photoshop and do textures here with this UV template as an outline and guide to know where should we be painting textures. Just as a quick example, I'm doing this really messy thing so that you can see indeed, check-mark, we are affecting this. So I'm going to turn off the wire frame, I'm going to Save this out as a copy here, and I'm going to make it be a JPEG. It's going to save it as a copy. I'm going to hit "Save", hit "Okay." Now when we go back into Maya and we look at the shader for this object, we go to Lambert5 we can see in the color that there is something mapped to it. That's the three texture that we have had been painting. But if we want to bring in any other texture, and like the one we just edited in Photoshop, we can select it here and swap it out. Now indeed, check, we used the Photoshop image now. There's different ways you can use the 3D paint tool, which is this little button up here we've been learning about. We can actually use it and just complete the entire thing all inside Maya and never have to go to Photoshop, or we can use it as a guide and say, "Here's the forehead because that's where the big check is." When I'm in Photoshop, I can export the UVs as a wire frame, paint on that, and then bring it back in as a texture inside the shader color. That is the 3D paint tool. In our the next lesson we're going to learn another way to use it and different type of shader, and we'll jump back into the ghostbuster trap. But I encourage you to finish this out. I'm going to spend some time on my own and continue to paint this and make whatever design you want. I encourage you to have fun with this part. This is probably the most fun part of the lessons here and that you can be an artist and paint on your skull that we made. I also just want to make a quick note that in this example I did not use symmetry, and in 3D Paint Tool they don't actually call it symmetry, they call it reflection. You could turn on reflection and use this to paint your designs and have them be symmetrical across the model. Because it's a skull that might be useful so that we can have some symmetry here. But artistically, you might want some variation on either side. But that's definitely an option to turn on reflection and change the axis that it is reflecting on. But probably you'll want it on x because that's how this model is set up. But thanks for watching and I'll see you next lesson. 22. Mix Rust Shader: In this lesson, we're going to take the knowledge that we've learned so far and put it to use to add some more details of that ghost buster trap, and we take a look at the Arnold render view, we can see that the brush metal that we made is pretty standard. It's pretty clean. There's no rough marks on it and it looks like this ghost buster trap has never been used to actually catch ghosts. Let's add a little more detail to this brush metal, and we're going to do that by adding a new shader to this using a 3D Paint as a mask. Let's first create the 3D paint. Let's open up the hybrid shades so we can keep track of what we're doing here. I'm clicking the little hyper shade button up here. This should pop open and we can see our brush metal here, and we have two, so if you remember, we made one for this panel and then these two have different kinds. If we click this little button here, we can map it out and see that it's the original brushed metal. Let's leave that up, and let's also create a Lambert, and anytime we're in the Hypershade, we can create new materials and they're not applied to anything yet, so we still have to apply them. But let's select the object, and we can either middle mouse drag it and let go over on top of it or we can right mouse click and go to assign material to a Viewport Selection, and when we let go, it'll be assigned. The reason why we're doing this right now is because we're going to do some 3D Painting like we did in the previous lesson. But of course, it only works on the Maya shader, so we need to apply Maya shader before we do it. Let's click the 3D Paint Tool, and we need to, of course, assign the texture to it, and 4K is fine, and JPEG is okay. Now we can start painting. Let's first flood it with a color. Let's go to a white color, and we'll just flood that paint, and then let's do a black because we're going to create a mask. We want a black and white values, basically, that's all we need. We don't need the color, and we're going to take a look at this section here. We can click the folder and it should go right to your brush shapes folder. If we can preview them, we can see there's all these different types of stencils that we could be using. We're going to use this to create a mask here so that when we paint, it looks a little more organic. This is a new part to this same tool that we're getting familiar with. I've got black, I've got the paint turned on, we've assigned the thing so now I can start painting, and what I'm looking to do is add rust to certain areas, and right now, this black area is going to reveal a new shader that we're going to make with a mixed shader. Let's take a second and paint some rust, where we want rust on this panel. Now, we have where we want the rust to show. We can save this texture out like we did previously by clicking the ''Save texture'' button, and now that we have that texture, we can reapply the material from the Hypershade. We can do a lot of work from the Hypershade itself now. Let's bring that brush metal in the original material that we had. Let's set it to focus in on everything that we have. We currently have this texture that we just created. We can see that because it's a part of the Lambert. If we map out the Lambert, we can see that there is a texture going into the color. We see our color. We know that this is the actual file. If we click on it and go to the attribute, we can actually see that. Right-clicking here, and we can see it populate in the sample area here. Now, we know this is the file that we want, but we want it to apply on the brush metal, but not necessarily to the brush metal, we want to mix in a different shader. Let's go about making that rust shader first. Let's apply a new shader that's going to be our rust shader. We'll go assign new material and we'll go down to the Arnold shaders and pick AI standard surface. Let's go to bring it in here the Hypershader as well, and we can just map this out. Let's first create the color that we want. Let's make it like a brown type of a color, and now let's open up the Arnold render view so we can see the changes that we're making in real time. I'll play on the play button here, so we can see we can have a pretty basic shader. It's just a brown shader, and we want to add some bump to it. Let's create a bump map by clicking the checker box and go to the noise tab. If we zoom in, we can see there's some noise, but it's really big, it's really spread out. Let's go into the bump itself and increase the ratio, and let's increase the frequency ratio as well. As we do that, you can see it change here. We can right-click and get a sample, and we'll have to refresh that more as we update it. So I'm just reducing the amplitude, so it's all evenly noise distributed here. It's looking pretty good so far, but it looks like we might have gone to strong on the noise potentially. Let's go back into the bump map and change that to 0.5. It reduces it down a little bit, and it might also be the reflections are throwing us off, so let's go back. I'm just clicking these buttons to go in and out of the shader. We could also click the different parts of it from the Hypershade to navigate around. I'm going back to the shader here and let's take a look at the specular. Let's increase the roughness because if we think about rust, rust is pretty rough. Now, that's looking a lot better, and we can even apply a fractal to this rust if we wanted. But for right now let's just leave it as it is and we can come back to it if we'd like. We have the rust and we have the bitmap here that gives it some texture. Let's maybe increase that just a little bit. How do we combine the two shaders? We have this shader and we have that shader. There's a new node called the mixed node, and if we type in AI, it'll bring up all the Arnold shaders, and if we type in AIM, it'll bring up the AI mix shader here. You can also get to it just from going into the shader options and just scrolling down on Arnold here. If we scroll down, we can see AI mix shader. Now, let's apply this to the object. I'll select it and right-click and say, assign material to viewports selection. You can see it's just black because there's nothing going into it. If we look at the shader here and attribute editor, it's asking for two shaders, shader 1 and shader 2, and the mix weight is at 0.5, which means it's going to blend between these two shaders, but they're currently empty so we need to fill them. We have the AI standard surface here, which we're going to call the rust, so let's label it Rust, and let's select the mix shader. In the middle, mouse drag the Rust into shader 1, and now you can see it's back to how we had it. Let's bring in the brush metal. We have the brush metal up here somewhere, or maybe we got rid of it, so that we can just bring it in here. Brush metal, we can just middle mouse drag it from there and let go. Now, it's just mixing 50-50. We can drag this and see it go from one to the other. But if you remember, we have that texture, so let's use it. We painted it here. Let's middle mouse drag the texture into the mix weight, and as soon as we do that, we should get a change here and not a lot happened. Let's look at why that might be. First, it could be because we swapped our values for white for black. But also it could be because the blacks aren't black enough that we painted. If you remember from a previous lesson, the Alpha's luminance is really important because if you look at what's actually getting piped in here to the mix, is the, let's organize this a little bit better. You can click this rearranged button to sort everything out a little bit better. It's this little arrow button here, so now we can get a better look at what's going into the mix. We can see it's the Alpha that's actually going into the mix, and if you remember from a previous lesson, there is no Alpha here. It's just black and white. We need to tell it that the black and white value is the Alpha or we could just map in one of the three channels here. If we do that, we can just circumvent the Alpha thing, and now we can see the painting that we did is revealing the Rust shader beneath it. Again, the advantage of using the Alpha is that we have these Alpha color balance slider is here so that if we choose Alpha's luminance, we get back to the same result that we just had if we were just piping in one of the red, green, and blue channels. Now that it's Alpha, we can increase this or decrease this with the Alpha gain and the Alpha offset, so that's pretty helpful. But let's say maybe this doesn't go far enough and we want it to affect it even more. We could add a color correct node. We can click on the shader here under Arnold and get to the color correct node. If we click that, it'll load it in, and we can just pipe in the Alpha from this image into the color correct node and now, pipe the Alpha into the mix. We're just putting this in the middle of that stream there. Now, it has to go through the color correct node, so that now with a color correct node, we have all these different options now. We could change the Gamma, which if we piped in the red channel, this would be red. This will be green, this will be blue. This would be a way if we did pipe in the red channel that we could actually affect that, and so we can increase the Alpha gain or Alpha offset here as well. That's another level of adjustment that we could have. That's how you add more detail and realism with the mix shader. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. 23. Ghostbuster Trap Finishing Touches: In this lesson, I want to finish up the Ghostbuster Trap. Let's take a look at where we are at right now with the Arnold RenderView. I'll hit "Play", so we can preview the render here. You can see that I've gone ahead and done some textures for these other panels as well with the same method we've learned about. You can see that this one is maybe too dark here. Let's take a look at that one real quick and refine that. I'll open up the Attribute Editor. First, let's delete the history here. Also, I would like to say to save often. When you're doing these render previews, Maya can crash. It's not uncommon for it to crash here. Let's scroll down to the color balance. If you remember, we have these Alpha Gain sliders and we actually go past two, which is where the slider wants to go to now. I'll hit "Three" and then just keep driving this up until I get that contrast that I like to see between the rust and the metal. I'll drag it up maybe a little bit more and then spin around and see where there are reflection that is similar between these panels, because I don't want them to be too different. The next thing I want to do is attack this black metal here. This fractal that we used in one of the first lessons is pretty obviously a fractal and you want to avoid that type of a texturing. Let's click this and get into the surface here. Let's go to the roughness as we get to the fractal. Let's first go into the texture and actually increase the coverage. You can see there's this one big piece here. I will not scale all this down there, it's a lot more coverage in all of these areas here. We can cheat that by going into the place2DTexture and actually repeat the UVs more than one time. So let's go five. We could actually stretch it and make it look streaky, but in this case I want to keep it even and maybe even go further and do maybe eight and eight. Now that we have that, let's go back into the fractal and adjust the texture here by bringing down the amplitude. It's a lot more subtle of an effect. It's not like these big chunks every once in awhile. Of course, scroll around. If you can tell, this is taking a minute to update. The other thing that we have at our disposal here is this Crop Region. We can click and drag just a region here so that it will update much quicker. We can see as we rotate around, the fractals are working pretty good maybe it's still a little strong here. If we don't want to bring down the amplitude. We can always go to the color balance, and adjust the Alpha Gain here as well. That's working pretty good. We can also increase the offset, so that everything comes down with it. Let's see. Let's just turn all the way off here and then increase the Alpha Gain, and try to find a happy medium here. Maybe it's the amplitude to even this out, and bring this back down and bring some of their reflection back. I'm just adjusting these it's not a perfect science. You really have to train your eye because it's easy once you're making these tiny little tweaks to get lulled into a sense of it looking good. I like to go at the extremes and push it and see if I'm really actually doing any good, and if this is actually going in the direction I wanted to go. I think something like that was probably going to be good. We can always adjust that later, but the other thing I'd like to do is add that same fractal. Because we've already put all this work, I don't want to have to create entirely new fractal for this shader. So I'm going to save this real quick, and click this and delete the history, so we can get into the surface here. I will open up the Hypershade as well, so we can actually map this out much quicker. Let this load up and then click this little button here. We get the object that we have selected and we can get that all mapped out. Let's click both of these. I'm shift-selecting over here in the viewport. I can select both of these at the same time and get both of them pulled up. Now that we have the fractal here, we can just pipe this in. I'm just going to turn this off for now because I've had at crash earlier on me. When it's trying to update, when you are putting a new textures, sometimes it doesn't like that. Actually, let me zoom in here so you can see this because I'm not sure how small you're watching it on. Basically, what I'm doing is I'm taking the same situation we have here, Out Alpha going into the specular roughness that we've been messing with on the black metal. I'm just going to pipe that into the Specular Roughness on the ramp of the doors here, so that we can take advantage of the work we've already done. I'm going to open up the Arnold RenderView again and hit "Play". You can see we have that to our advantage here. Now, we can use both of them and it's looking pretty good. The other thing that we can do is add a bump map to this. Let's go into the shader. I'm just clicking that. I want to close on the Hypershade. Let's create a bump map. Let's go to Geometry and let's click that. You know what? Let's actually use the ramp, same thing that we've done. Let's open up the Hypershade again and just use this ramp to our advantage again. Let's click this and map it out. Let's duplicate this ramp. If I hit "Copy Paste", it will work pretty well. Now, I have a duplicate that I can adjust a little bit. If you remember earlier, we have a linear interpolation. There's no fuzziness here, and if we pipe that in as a bump map, it's going to look pretty wonky. We're going to have to adjust the ramp and that's why we're duplicating it now. With area standard selected, let's click "Bump map" and let's just choose file so we get all that mapped in here properly. We don't want the file so I can just delete that. We just clicked file just so it maps this node here for us. Let's take the ramp and input the Bump Value of the Alpha into the Bump Value. If we take a look at this, we can't really see much happening yet. Let's just turn on the crop here. Let's go to the ramp itself. We can actually click this little button here and get a bigger view of it. Let's open this up. Before we change the interpolation which we can do here, let's just add some anchor points here so that the colors will stay the same. I'm just clicking in the middle here and just going through so that there's a point on either end, there's a black to black and then yellow to yellow. That way it'll hold up these lines when we change the interpolation. I'm just trying to drag these close to their partners here, and that looks like it's going to be pretty good. If we choose the interpolation to maybe linear or something like that we can see there's this bump right here, because you can see where this is fading out now. We can change this to something else and we can see how this changes the bump map here on the ramp. It looks like this actually has some separation now. We can get down at an angle like this, we can see that it looks like these are two separate levels here. We get that it's cheating and even though there's one piece of geometry. This really shows the power of bump maps. We can add some dimensionality to these doors without having to do any more modeling or anything like that. We can do it in the textures. Just keep that in mind as you're working that, that's a possibility. It looks like it's a little too strong. Let's bring up the Hypershade, go to the bump here. We can adjust the bump depth, maybe bring that down to 0.5, maybe even 0.1. We just want something subtle to separate these colors out. It might be not strong enough. I think that's working pretty good. I always like to look at it from different angles to make sure it's working okay. Let's get to an angle that we can see this effect happening. I'm going to try to zoom in here as much as I can so that you can see it on your screen. Let's go into the ramp, and we actually have noise here. If I start with the noise, you can see there's these really big waves here. We want very small waves, so you want to increase the frequency. Let's just crank this up. You can see there's way more waves here but it's still not high enough, so we can type in our own values. You can see it's starting to look a lot more noisy there, but we want just a little bit of it to come through on those edges so that they're not totally straight. Check that out. We had like a little noise to this separation here to make it look even more organic. Just keep dialing that in to make it look a little rougher here. When we're doing that procedurally, we're not having to go back in to Photoshop or not having to do anything like that. We can just update this as we want to inside of Maya, and that's the power of procedural texturing. In the next lesson, let's take a look at lighting this thing in a more interesting way. One of the last things I'm going to do is continue to add shaders to these gray pieces here. These are basically going to be red versions of this shader we've already made here. You could duplicate out these shaders and then just change the color to red, pipe that in, and then you can even do some of your own texturing with 3D paint. You can see how far we've come. If you remember from the beginning, our model looked pretty similar to this chrome ball here. The reflections on here we're very chrome like. Quickly, I just want to show you the presets which we've already looked at. But I just want to drive that home that it's a good place to start. If I assign a new material, go to Arnold Shader StandardSurface and wait for it to pop up. I'm just going to call this rubber and use the preset here, and go down to Rubber and go over to Replace. Its just off the screen there. It's a really quick starting point for us. It's maybe a little too bright, the color isn't dark enough. So let's just dial that down. Then of course, we're going to add procedural textures to it and make it a little rough and whatnot. But I'm probably going to use that same shader on the little knobs here, the little cylinders, they go around this. Then I'm probably going to use the metal shader on the inside pieces here and these discs, and make maybe a new one for the screw here. But yeah, this is pretty much it. We've basically done a pretty good job of shading this entire piece and it looks pretty decent. If this is your first thing ever shading in Maya in 3D, you should be pretty proud if you've gotten this far. One trick real quick that I wanted to show you is, say I want to apply a texture just to this piece here and not the rubber knobs around the outside. Because these are children of this, if you remember in the modeling where we parented all of these to this so that they all rotate together, it's hard to select this thing. If we right-click and start assigning a new shaders it going to assign it to everything. Well, one easy way to go about selecting just that parent piece that's controlling everything, is to press down on your keyboard. Now, we just have that piece. You can separate your selections if you like. I'll just finish this up with the red pieces here and the other rubber shaders being applied. In the next lesson we're going to learn about lighting this thing with a little bit of fog. Thanks for watching. 24. Fog Lighting: In this lesson, we're going to do some pretty fun and learn about fog and lighting. At this stage of the game, you should have a pretty well textured and shaded ghost buster trap. Let's just take a look at what we have so far. I have done some 3D texturing on the other shaders and basically put in a mix shader for everything so that we can map in a Chrome texture underneath. It looks like this stuff is painted. Then the scratches reveal more of a metal Chrome texture on this stuff. It's all the same techniques you've learned how to add rust to these plates. In this way, it's using the textures to reveal Chrome. It looks like painted metal and with some scratches on it. It adds a lot more realism and organic quality to it. At this stage of the game, this is what we're working with. Let's make something super cool and have some glowing light and fog coming out of the doors here. Let's close this down and learn how to do that. First, let's open up the doors will just select the geometry hit "E" to rotate this stuff up. We need to open the doors up, then let's go into the render settings. This is something that we haven't touched yet. It's this little button up here with a clapper board and the gear wheel. When click that, we get a new window. We want to make sure that we change our render that we're using to Arnold renderer. If you don't have that loaded up, you can just go to windows settings and preferences Plug-in Manager. It's down at a mtoa.bundle down here, right here. You probably already have that turned on because we've been using Arnold shaders. But in this case we need to tell it we want to render with this on as well. You can see these tabs change. Now we get the Arnold renderer tab. Let's go down to the environment. Now we see atmosphere and we can add a texture into here. If you click that, we get some unique options and we're going to want the atmosphere volume. Let's click that. Now you can see it's piped in here. We can get to it through clicking this button. You can see the attributes of it over here. Before the fog can work, we need some lights that work with it. Atmospheric fog and Arnold is particular to certain types of lights. It will not work with infinity-based lights meaning sky domes and directional lights that come from an infinite distance. It really like spotlights. We're going to add a spotlight to this scene. Let's close the render settings, and you notice under Arnold lights, it does not have a spotlight but it is actually located over here with this little flashlight. It'll still work in Arnold, it's just not an Arnold, only light like the other ones are. Let's click the spotlight and you can see we've created it here. We need to enable shown lights under this tab if we've turned it off like we did earlier in the series. Now we can manipulate this like anything else. Rotate it up and shoot it in the direction of straight up as what we want. Let's set this in here. As long as we don't have this point at the bottom, go through the geometry. This is too far right there. We want to get it just above the floor of this bottom. Let's rotate that and even direction so 90 degrees. Now let's see what we have with certainly Arnold render view and hit "Play". Nothing really happens. Why is that? If we go into the atmosphere fog, we can get to it back through the Render settings and click this little button. Now we'll go to the attribute editor. We can see it almost like a shader, like we had been shading things. You can see which only this up. You can see the density is automatically set to zero, which is not very helpful. If you're creating this, you would assume that the default would be at some value greater than zero. But yeah, sometimes the defaults aren't what you want them to be. If we increase this, we should start to see some fog and you can see it start to illuminate right here. Now you can see it illuminate. Let's turn this all the way up and now we can get some fog, check that out. It's basically taking the shape of the light. We need to adjust the light so that is a little bit broader, so it fills up this entire piece here, or you can just leave it like this if you like. I'm going to make mine a little bigger and there's a couple of different tools we can use with the spotlight. I'm going to click the spotlight and I'm going to increase the intensity. You can see the fog almost feels like it's more intense fog by increasing the intensity of the light itself. We can increase the cone angle. Let's just spread that out. Let's also increase the penumbra angle. That's basically like the feathering of this edging, see how it's hard, this edges of the spotlight. Now watch as we increase the penumbra angle, it gets a lot softer now you can't see that hard edge. That's super helpful. Maybe went a little too far so we can just dial it back a little bit. Now let's go take a look at the fog because it's just white and that's fine. But I think could look a lot more interesting. I'm just going to move this over just a touch and trying to keep both of these things in the scene so you can see it update as well. I'm just moving it over so that the light is emitting from the middle of the doors and not from one end or the other. Now we have that. Let's go back into the atmosphere and mess with that. The density is at a value of one. We could mess with that a little more. The other thing I want to do is make this a purple color because it is a ghost alien type of trap. We want some more interesting color that is white so you can change the color here. Then finally, the thing that's really going to make this look amazing is by adding a texture to the density. You can see that we have this checker box over here so you guessed it. Just like everything else we can pipe in a texture here. Let's click that. The only thing special we need to consider about this is the fact that this fog is kind of 3D. It is taking up space in three-dimensions. It's not just on a flat plane. When we look at what type of texture we want to map in here, we need to look at 3D textures. Three textures are just that, they're basically a texture that goes through a volume. Imagine like putting glitter or ink or something in a glass of water, it's going to create patterns in three-dimensions. That's the same idea that we want to do here. I'm going to create a cloud texture here. As soon as I click that, you can see it adds all this great organic texture to the fog. It looks so much more believable than the solid piece that we had. Of course, we can adjust the attributes of this cloud as well and increase it or decrease that. But yes, so this is pretty much how you create some cool look and fog coming out of your ghost buster trap. I'm going to just tweak this stuff a little bit for one second. You can stop now or you can go along with me and see how I'm going to finish this out. It's all about that final 10 percent. I'd like to get that highlight on this three core angles. You can see the highlight of this. Let's also increase the intensity of the spotlight so that it's a bit of a stronger effect. Of course, we can type in a bigger number here. Let's do something like 20 and see what happens. That looks a lot better. That's already looking really, really good. I love how quickly and simply you can add so much more in my and with Arnold's tool set. That is how you add fog to the ghost buster trap. Of course, you can animate all this stuff that we'll learn how to animate later on in another section. That's a really useful tool to add a lot of dimensionality atmosphere to all of your renderers as you finish them up and put the final polish on them. In the next few lessons we're going to go back to the bones character model and finish that one up as well. I'm going to show you a few more tips and tricks. Then we're going to finish this whole section out with covering how we're actually going to renderer a sequence or final image out of Arnold and Maya. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. 25. "Bones" Displacement Maps: Welcome to this lesson where we will finish the bones character by adding some texture to the surface of his bones with something called displacement maps. We've learned about bump maps in a previous lesson that doesn't displace the actual geometry. But in this case, we want to learn about a map that will add geometry at render time. It'll keep us from having to have very dense geometry in the scene. If we go up here and we'd go to heads up Display, let me just tear this off and we can turn on Poly Count and you'll get this little box up here of numbers. You can see that we have a 160,128 faces, and this is the number you want to look at when you're calculating how dense as my geometry. We have a 160,000 and you can get up to several millions worth of faces when you have a very dense piece of geometry, like a high-resolution character for film and TV. To reduce the amount of faces which slows down the machine and slows down the render time, we can actually add geometry at render time and all that detail at render time so we don't have to actually manage it and use it and see it in this scene because if we start animating this with several millions worth of polygons, it's going to be very slow and animators would not like to do that, and which is usually if you're a one man studio, that's yourself. Let's figure out how we can add some detail without adding any polygons in our scene. Let's first add the shader so everything has the same bone color to it. I'm going to select everything just by clicking and dragging and then Control Shift clicking. Remember if I was to shift select this, it will deselect it or select it. To add it for sure I want to Control Shift select so it'll always be adding. Now that we have all that selected, let's right-click and add a new material. We'll make AI standard surface like we've done before, and then the color will just color pick this color here. I'm going to color, choose the picker, and pick this color. Everything should be the same color as our bone. It might look a little different here, and we're going to adjust that later depending on how accurate the picker was but that'll get us pretty close for now. We have the shader, let's open up the hyper shade and take a look at it. I'll select one of the bones and I'll click this little button to map it out. It's pretty basic, there's nothing coming in yet like textures or procedural textures. But take a look at this group. Every shader has a group once it's applied to a piece of geometry. Check out these two here. What we're going to be concerned with is the displacement shader. Let's take a look at what that actually means. But first, let's just get the shader in a good spot because it has all the default values. Let's turn on the Arnold Renderer view, I hit play, again, you'll see that we need a light in the scene. Lets go to Arnold, let's go to lights, and let's create a fiscal sky. I want to click the dome light here and scroll down to the camera option, and let's turn that to zero so that the actual visibility of the sky dome will not be visible in the render. We can test that here to show you the difference. I'll go back to the Arnold Render view and hit play, now we can actually see our model. If I crank up this camera, now you can begin to see the horizon. It's not really useful so let's just turn it off. The first thing you can see here is the fact that the reflections are very sharp. Let's turn up the roughness of the reflections, and to do that we go into the AI standard surface and let's rename this to bone and let's turn up the roughest of the specular. If you'll notice, still has the Lambert that we use to do the three paintings so we'll also need to apply this shader to it that we've been making here. Let's do it after the fact that we figured out all of these values so that we can just duplicate it out and apply it with that texture. We have this material and it's looking bony has and has somewhat a shiniest, but it's also a rougher surface, so the specular highlights are not super sharp. It's at a decent spot and let's just evaluate the color here as well. First get this material on the head and make a determination if we need to change the color. I'll go to the bone and I'll say Edit, Duplicate, Shading Network. I'm just going to middle mouse drag this after I rename it to bone head and I'm just going to middle mouse drag this on the skull, let go may or may not apply. If it's being finicky, then you can right-click down here with it's selected to the a signed shade to view port selection. Now you can see I got rid of our texture, but we can go into our Textures tab here and we can see that we have a File 1 in our reference file. Let's just see what these are. The reference files from modeling that we use to model the character, and the file one is actually our head shaped color. If we right-click on it here, we can see the sample that is our head. With the bone head material selected here, let me just map these out by clicking the rearranged graph button here, and we can see them a little bit or click the bone head. Let's middle mouse drag this file one onto the color. Real quickly you can see that the colors still isn't accurate between the texture and the shader. That doesn't have a texture, it's just a regular shader, but we're trying to match these two. Color picking didn't work so let me show you one of the way to go about matching color here between textures. Let's open up the UV editor. I'm just going to dock the toolkit here and select the head so that we have the texture and our view port of the Toolkit. Lets go to the shader for that head. I'm just going to color of any of these and choose a picker. Now if I hover over this, you can see I'm getting numbers here, a 1.85 and 1.65. All we need to remember is 0.85 and 0.65. Let's close this out, hit escape, and let's select the bone material here. To get to different types of values here, we can choose this and the numbers we were getting were an RGB, zero to 1.0. We can enter these in here and have the same color as the texture. Now you can see if we go to the Arnold Renderer view, that these two should be matching now. I'm going to turn on the 3D manipulation so I can move around in the view port of the Renderer view. Now these two are matching. Let's give them some displacement detail and learn about displacement. I'm going to zoom in here and I'm going to open up the hyper shade. We're going to dock the Render View here inside the Hypershade. They can work on the material and see the render happen in real-time here. We have the bone selected. Let's map it out. Let's map in a fractal into the displacement shader. We know that in the 2D textures and fractal. Let's move these so they're organized a little bit. Just input the color and the displacement shader and see what happens. Now, it blows everything up, and we need to adjust this. Let's open up the fractal here and see it in the attribute editor on the side. Right click. We can see it's just the default things here. Basically what's happening is on a scale of zero to one, or black and white, the displacement shader is determining should it push vertices out or in? In this case, it looks like it's pushing them mostly out by quite a lot. We can adjust the color gain to reduce that amount of everything being displaced. You can see it's all coming down now. Because what we want is just something subtle on the surface. We don't want everything to be displaced out a large distance, we just want it to be very subtle. Just on the surface. But the problem we're contending with is that there's not a ton of geometry to move here. If we look at the actual geometry that makes up this bone, it's not many vertices. We need to figure out how to add geometry at render time. To do that, let's go into the Arnold tab here of this bone shape. Let's scroll down and look at subdivision. Currently it's set to none. Let's set it to Catclark. That was just named after the type of mathematician I believe that figured this out. As we turn that on, you can already see it has more detail. Let's go to none. You can see there's no detail here. Let me just isolate this with the isolated region tool, so that it updates maybe a little quicker. You can see there's no detail. Now we turn on Catclark, and look what happens. We immediately get more detail. Let me just turn up the color gain here so you can see the difference a little more obviously. It is displacing it, but it's not very accurate. It's just a big block. Let's go back into the Subdivision here, by clicking on the piece of geometry, and going to Catclark. Now you can see how much more detail is being added here because there's more geometry. Well, you can still see that it's tearing here. What we can do is increase the iterations. Even a couple of times. Now look at how much more detail there is. That's actually pretty good. We might need to add a fourth. But three might be enough. It depends on how accurate you want this to get. Let's go back to the fractal shader here and just turn down the gain of this quite a bit. Now you can see we're adding a ton of realism at render time, and we don't have to have millions of polygons. You can just dial this in depending on how much displacement texture that you want. When you get close to this thing, it'll have a little bit of texture to the surface. Unlike a bump map, it's actually displacing the silhouette. If we getting close here, we can see the silhouette is not round all the way around. How this is used in modeling is typically, this is a more intermediate type of a thing to know, but out of a sculpting software, this is what's used to add a ton of detail like pores and things at a very fine level. Even at a big level like scales or something like that, displacement math will be increasingly important as you learn more about 3D. What's left is to turn on this feature for every piece of geometry. There's one way we can do that a lot quicker than having to click each piece. As we've done, go to its Shape tab, go to Arnold, go down here, click Catclark, and go to four iterations, which maybe I'm going to change to three for now. Let's select all of the geo. Let's go to the Windows, General Editors, Attribute Spreadsheet. Now we have the attribute spreadsheet open, let's go up to the Arnold tab, and let's scroll over to where we can see the subdivision. Look right here, we can see AI sub div type, and AI sub div iterations. It looks the same here, subdivision type, subdivision iterations. It's this data just in a spreadsheet format. Why this is important, because we can click one, scroll to the bottom, shift-click and type in catclark, and hit Enter. Now, we've turned it on for all of them. We can also turn the iterations to three. I'm just going to click the bottom one, click the top one, and type in three, and hit Enter. Now you can see for the one that we had last selected over here, it's done all of that. We've done it for every piece of geometry. If we turn on the Arnold render view again, then hit Play, we can see that the render view does take a little more time to render it all. It's something to consider when you're doing this, that it will increase the render time. But if you zoom in here, you'll be able to see a lot more detail. If you've given your geometry the right UVs, the detail will be pretty similar across everything and consistent. If we take a look at the face, we can see that we haven't applied yet to that. Let's open that up. Open the Hypershade. Let's map that out. Let's also map it out with this bone. I'm just shift-selecting these and then clicking the in and outputs here. You can see that we don't see the fractal here, so we actually need to map the groups. Let's map the group's out. Now we get the fractal. Let's just drag this fractal out color into the displacement group shader of the bone as well. The bone head. Now when we do that, you can see this is updating, and it's adding a lot more detail to the head. The last thing you might want to do with this model is just add a piece of geometry here so that the light doesn't go all the way through the nostrils, so that this is actually just black. Let's grab a piece of geometry. What it's actually we're seeing it looks like is this bone coming through. There's a couple of different ways we could resolve that. Let's take a piece of geometry, just a plane. Let's bring it up. We'll place it to block this piece. We can also put a lattice on it to help to form it and get it out of the way. But I think this is probably going to be the quickest thing for us to do. Just increase that. I'm going to Shift Select the head, and parent it to the head by hitting P. Wherever the head goes, that will go with it. We need to add a new type of shader here that is a utility type of a thing to fix issues like this. Let's open up the Arnold render views, so you can see what we're about to do, and the hyper shade. Let's right-click and say Add New Material. Let's choose a surface shader. This is a Maya Shader. Let's click Surface Shader. The default color is black, so that should be fine. But what the surface shader does is it has no reflections and nothing else pretty much. We know it'll be totally black there. Let's turn on the Arnold render view preview button here by hitting Play, and take a look at that now. It looks like what this is actually showing up as is the light coming down into the skull from this direction. It's not just this little piece of skull, but it's the entire back cavity here. What we can do instead is place this in front of the eyes so that light doesn't go into the skull. It depends on however you want to resolve it for yourself. But this is just one way to make sure no light gets in here. What we're actually seeing is going to be all black if that's what you're going for. In this lesson, we learned about displacement maps, using the displacement shader for Arnold, and what surface shaders are, and how to apply the subdivisions at render time. This is an advanced topic, but it is very, very important, very useful for any modular. If you get into more advanced modeling techniques, you will use displacement maps. It's very useful to know where that resides for the Arnold tab, and for using the spreadsheet editor, so that you can edit multiple pieces of geometry at once. You're not having to select each one and go through and turn that on for each one. That's it for the bones section here, we're going to take a little look at lights and some rendering. I will see you next lesson. Thanks for watching. 26. "Bones" Glass Material: While we're talking about shading, I wanted to briefly cover a glass material problem that you might run into on how to fix it. Basically, let's take this head, and apply a new material and create a glass preset. It's one of the shader standard surface. If I go to presets, and I go down here to Glass, and I'm going to choose replace. It's off screen here. You can see it looks like glass now in the viewport, you can see through it here. If we turn on the Arnold RenderView, we can see that it does indeed look like glass. That might seem like you're all done there. But the shadow is maybe too dark. The light should go through the glass a little more. There's a couple different things you can do with glass surface. You can try on thin wall, so it's going to make the object to look a lot thinner. It's a very thin piece of glass, and if you decrease the opacity, nothing's changing. Why is that? Well, that has to do with one issue here, that if we select the geometry, and go into the head shape or the shape of the head. It'll be called whatever your piece of geometry is, and then shape. Shape is a technical term for a node that's common in Maya. If we go down to the Arnold tab here, you can see that we have opaque turned on. This is the one little thing that you have to look out for when you're using a glass shader, is to uncheck that. Now you can see that indeed there is no shadow. Well, why is that? What if we want some costixs here? Costixs are about refraction through a material onto a surface. That'll make sense here in a second when I turn on a color for transmission. Let's turn it maybe something to blue. Now you can see what would really be happening if this was a blue piece of glass, it would be refracting that color, and creating this costixs transmission onto the surface here. The other thing to consider, is if you remember before when we lowered the opacity, nothing happened. But now if we lower the opacity, you can start to see through the subject. The piece of geometry and the costix change as well. You can see the areas of different thickness, have a different amount of costix transmission on them. That's one thing to just look out for when you're using glass preset, to uncheck the opaque from the Arnold shape area here. Thanks for watching, I'll see you in the next lesson. 27. "Bones" Lights: Welcome to this lesson, where we will discuss lights and the different types of lights. We've learned a couple of different kinds so far. We have the sky dome in this scene, which we can see here. We've also learned about the directional light and a spotlight. I'm going to reduce the Render Settings, so that we can see these quicker. I'm going to turn this off and go to the Rendering tab. Go to Render, Test Resolution. Let's go even smaller, like 50 percent of the resolution. It's going 50 percent, based on what is set here in the Render settings. We've been in this once before, when we chose Arnold Renderer view here. It's going based off of this number here, or should be, if it's not. That's where we can set that, but I can also reduce the camera, the sample here. I'm sure going to crank that down a little bit, and I'll explain that a little more later, but basically, I want to make sure that I am using the quickest rendering to evaluate stuff that we have here. When I hit Play Now, it should be a little smaller size here. It's taking a minute to render, but basically, all we haven't seen is a sky dome light. It's very directional light and it's not super interesting. How do we make more interesting lighting? Let's look and see what we have at our disposal. Let's delete the sky dome light. Let's just start with the idea of a three-point light setup, that's in filmmaking, one of the most common lighting setups. I'm going to go over to the Rendering tab here, and you can see we have different lights. Well, basically, never use an ambient light, because it is not physically based. Ambient light is a cheat, and so you can just mess around with it, but I would recommend never using it. Directional light is going to have no fall-off. It's also somewhat not physically based. We can go over here and see the different attributes that we have, which are just very few. To be able to adjust these settings, let's open up Arnold Render View and see how we can affect this object. This is pretty flat as well, and you can see that the shadows are pretty hard. Most lights have this shadow softening effect. We're using the Arnold Renderer, so we need to go to the Arnold Render tab in that light to change most of the settings. We can change the intensity here of course, and that's fine, and the color, but there's more settings down here, mainly about this shadow, kind of silhouette here, the hardness of this edge of the shadow. If we're going to affect that, we need to increase the angle. By doing that, you can see the shadow gets much smoother. That's one way that we can affect the lights, and most lights have this. Of course, I don't think the ambient light has one. You can see it's very noisy here, and that's because the samples are so low, so we going to increase the samples. That just increases the render time, but it takes out all that noise. Now it's a lot smoother and there's no grainy noise there. You can also see that it's still sharp where it is closer to the ground. You can see it's sharp, shadow down here and more soft towards the head, the further away from the ground of the object is. That's one way to affect directional lights. Let's make this a little more, three points. The idea in three-point lining is, you have a key light and it's usually one of your brightest, if not the brightest. Let's use that and get it fairly directional on a three core angle. I'm going to reopen the Arnold Render View, and make sure that's the correct direction we're going for. I'm going to go to the light settings and say, this is a sun light. I'm going to add a little color to it. Now, let's go to learn about another light called an area light. An area light is like what it sounds like. It's almost like a soft box, if we're familiar with photography. The only thing with area lights is, they're very expensive at render time. Everything's about the slow down a lot. You can change the size of them. It's very nice to use, but you're going to pay for it at render time. I use these very sparingly. Also whenever you're lighting, it's good to isolate different lights since you didn't see what they're doing. I'm going to hide the directional light for now. We can see only what the area light is doing. You can see it's doing nothing. An area lights, like most other lights besides the directional, work on this quadratic scale here. We need to increase this intensity by quite a lot. We can also go to Arnold and increase the exposure here, which would help us out but you can see it has a lot of fall-off, like there's no light back here. That's about how physically based renders work. If you know about the physics of light, you know that they have a, I believe it's a quadratic fall-off. You can say, Change The Decay Rate here. Typically, we're using a Quadratic. You can change it to linear but I believe because we're using Arnold, it's going to ignore all of that, because Arnold is a physically based render. It's assuming all of the physical attributes of quadratic falloff and everything for you. Again, you can see this samples here. It's very noisy in the shadows, so we can increase that to make those shadows a little softer. The other thing we can do is, just turn off Cast Shadows all together. If we just wanted a cheapest light, and use it as a fill light, which is another term of light, we have the key light with a directional light and now this is going to be the fill. Depending on how we wanted to use the fill light, we can't say cast no shadows, but of course that is definitely not physically accurate. We don't get all this self shadowing in this ribcage, it helps define that area. I'm going to leave that on for now. Instead of using color here, I can also use color temperature, and this is just more accurate, it's based on kelvin temperature, basically just means warm or cool. When I make a cool fill light here, and I'm just going to reduce the exposure a little bit, and then it would turn back on the directional light. Now we have our fill and we have our key light, the directional being the key light. I think the key lights are a little strong. I'm going to reduce that down. Just a touch and maybe even rotate it a little more. With directional lights, it doesn't really matter where they are. I can move this around and it's not going to affect anything. It only matters when I rotate it because a directional light is basically like the sun. If you can imagine the sun, the rays are coming from a long distance so where it's positioned point-wise doesn't really matter as much. We're also getting a ton of bounce light off the ground for free. That's acting like our fill lights. You can see some of the blue color here and the shadows on the scapula. But so that's basically the key and the fill. Then the last thing we going to do is add a rim light. Just for demoing purposes, I'm going to use the spotlight which we've already used but I'm going to go ahead and use it again anyway. Because as a rim light, it's nice because we can direct it exactly where we want it. It looks like I'm going to need to isolate these two first lights and turn them off so we can see what the spotlight is actually doing. It looks like we need to increase the exposure like we did and now you can start to see part of the skeleton. I'm going to increase the intensity and it's really starting to work. That's actually a cool image just by itself. One other thing we can do to place lights especially the spotlights that I like to do is we go to panels, look through selected, and it's upside down. But basically we're using the light as a camera now. We can use all the same things that we've learned to be able to position the camera and point it exactly where we want it to point. Then we can also see the cone angle here. So we can increase the cone angle so that it shoots over a wider area. Now you can see that it's actually hitting all of our model. It's also hitting the ground here and the light is very hard, right there. As we learned in the directional light, we can adjust that by going down to the "Angle", but you can see we don't have the "Angle" here, we just have the "Radius". That's not the same thing. Always look for angle. Here up top we have "Penumbra Angle". As we increase that you can see it softens that shadow. Of course we can go past 10, we could say like 15 or something. It makes that a lot smoother. Now we have this very hard light riming this object. Now if we turn on these other two lights, we have our three-point lighting setup. We have our key light, which is the directional light. We have the area light, which is the fill over here, which is giving a little bit of a blue color. Then we have our spotlight, which is giving us our rim, which is adding a lot of highlights here, including this big one on the skull. You can mess around with these and adjust them like you want to have them, but that's basically those lights. Real quickly I wanted to discuss mesh lights. I'm going to delete all of these lights or just hide them at least for now because we might use them again. I close this and mesh lights are something, I'm still in the spotlight. You always want to be careful with that. You can see we lost the outline here of the cone. I think it's because it's too big beyond where we are. The way that we can tell it says Spotlight one here based on what our view is. I'm going to hold down space-bar click and go to a perspective view. I've unhidden this group here called mesh lights. I just took a bone from the leg, scaled it up and put two of them back here, rotated at 45 degrees. Mesh lights are something specific to Arnold. We need to go to the "Arnold lights" option here. I'm going to select both of these and go to "Mesh light". You can see it only did one of them. I need to hit that again and do that one as well separately. Let's see what we get just out of the box there, go to "Arnold Render View" and hit play. Similarly, you can see nothing is going on. So what would you do is go into the light, which we can get too from the outliner. We can also select it here. But basically it has the same properties as anything else. Like everything else that we've seen so far, we need to increase the intensity and the exposure. Let's just crank those up. Now we get a pretty cool light except we can't see it. To get the bone to actually be visible, we needed to turn on light visible here. Now we have the bone outline and we need to do that for both of them. Let's look at the intensity. We have a 10 and 10 on intensity and an exposure. I'm just going to add those same values here on the other bone. I'm going to turn on light visible. Now you can see we have this pretty cool light setup that adds a lot, I think to this character render. Like the other lights we have samples, you can see as this gets done rendering you can see it will try to clean this stuff up, but for the most part, it's really noisy here. This is part of the mesh light is part because the intensity is still fairly low. So we can increase the samples here and just selecting it from the outliner so we can keep up the Arnold render view here. We're just going to scale this down just a touch and increase the samples here as well. Then I'm going to turn on the directional light "Shift H". You can see these bones are acting like a really strong rim light, which is pretty cool. The one downside of mesh lights is that there is currently no workaround for it to cast shadows from, say, a directional light. Now that we've turned on this directional light, you can see that these lights themselves are actually casting shadows. In other cases, there may be workarounds or there are workarounds through light linking is an option, or turning off cast shadows for an individual object's mesh. But in the case of an Arnold mesh light, there is no workaround and you can talk to a solid angle and they'll tell you the same thing. So that is the limitation of mesh lights, even though they're super cool. Just be aware that that is an issue. In this lesson, we learned about the most commonly used lights for Maya and hope to see you in the next lesson where we'll create a rendered sequence for this. See you in the next lesson. 28. "Bones" Render Sequence: Welcome to this final lesson where we will cover how to render a sequence. In this scene, I have animated a camera called the master cam. I've also animated the lights, which you can see by clicking on the light preview here. You can see them if i click on and off. In this lesson, I'm not going to get into how I animated this stuff. You can watch the animation section of this course to learn about animation. But in this one, I want to explain how to render an entire sequence. Up until this point, we've only been rendering Arnold previews from this Arnold render view preview by hitting play up here, and we see a single image. But in the case of this scene, we have a animation and we need to render out this entire timeline. How do we do that? Let's look at the render settings and I'm just going to leave this timeline here in the middle, at the point where the light's actually turn on. I'm going to go into the render settings and explain a few things. This is the Render Settings button up here, and we get the Window, which you might be a little familiar with now, we've opened a few times, and we want to make sure that we're on render using the Arnold render because that's all the shaders and everything we've been building with. The first thing we want to look at is everything on this common tab is important, so let's run through it. Basically, we need to name the files. You can see the filename right now is just set to whatever the scene name is up here, and we can delete this and right-click and say, maybe the camera and these little tags we'll name it based on that. You can see when I dislike that are hit Enter, you can see it says perspective. We could do our own little tag and say Skull head lighting and then you could add a tag as well after that. I'm just going to leave that for now and I'm going to hit Enter so that it takes that change. Now you can see the file name is this. The whole reason why we're rendering out image sequences and not a movie file is because this a 100 frames depending on your computer and the type of animation you're rendering and lighting and everything, It could take days. I've even had renders take weeks. Let's say you take a week to render an entire sequence and one frame of that is messed up. If you had rendered out a movie which has a single file, you would have to re-render that entire thing or have to render out that one frame, and then do all this editing stuff. In the case of image sequences, you can just isolate the frame number that you want or the chunk of it and re-render out those frames. If there's an artifact, if the renderer failed at some point, and it's much easier, much better to use image sequences and that's just the standard, that's what everyone does. In the case of rendering an image sequence, you need to take these files, bring them in after effects. Premiere, I believe handles imaged sequences as well. Then it will interpret the 24 frames a second, which is the common things set down over here. That hey, this image sequence frame 1-100, which we can see here, is meant to be played back at 24 frames a second. Every second there will be 24 frames shown. This is one second [inaudible] 24, and after effects or per meter, you can look up how to import an image sequence, and then import these images into those programs and re-graph a movie, a dot MOV, or whatever other video file that you'd like to have. But when you're using 3D, you are dealing with image sequences. That's why we're choosing a filename for an image sequence. To get the sequence out, we need to say frame animation extension is not a single frame. We do not want a single frame, we want multiple frames so we want name.number.extension. Name means the filename we've put up here, dot number means the number of the frame down here on the timeline, because each one is going to be obviously unique. Then the extension, meaning the image format that we're choosing. When we click that, we can see it changes up here the file name again, and now we have the frame number and the extension of the image format we're choosing. EXR is a floating point format, which can have multiple layers in it and very high dynamic range, 16 or 32 bit images. If none of that makes any sense, click JPEG, and you don't have to worry about any of that. That's an 8 bit image and that's fine. You're probably not gonna be doing a ton of high and compositing if you're new to Maya. If you're coming from a compositing background, then you know all buddy XORs already probably and you'll want to choose that one. But if you're totally new, just choose JPEG and you're probably familiar with that with like taking pictures and stuff. It's the same idea. Now we need to tell it the frame range. We can see down here on the timeline and he'd speak 1-100, and we need to choose the renderable camera is the around one right now, we want the master cam, which is the one that's animated. Then we can choose the dimensions that we want it to be in. For me, I'm just going to do 720 and the larger it is, the longer each render is going to take. You can preview how long each frame is going to take by using their old render view, and when you hit Play down here on the bottom left it says rendering. But once it's done, it will have a number here, and that will be the timer. Basically, it'll say this took a minute and 25 seconds or something. I'm just going to leave that going. Maybe we'll set here in a second. The next thing is we want to be concerned with are the sampling numbers in the Arnold render tab. This basically means quality, and it divides it into different aspects of a render. But the main one you want to concern yourself with is the camera one. Because this is multiplies each one of these ones below it. It's like a global setting. Let's take a look at that now. Now that we've have a render done, we can see it took 35 seconds, but we have all these fireflies and that's a term called for an artifact where there's basically all these dots and it doesn't look maybe terrible right now. But keep in mind this is going to be an animated sequence. These little dots here, which I'm going to zoom in so you can see all these little dots in the background. Those are going to move every frame. It's going to look noisy as hell in an animated image sequence. We need to address this, and the quickest way to address it, but it might also be the most expensive for your render time, meaning your render time's going to increase, is to increase this camera settings. Let's crank it up to something like six and see what happens. Let me also just say, let me create that back down to two. Let's use this crop region tool so it goes a little quicker. Let's just choose a region. Let's assume we choose something with a little bit of the skull on it as well. Let's choose this region and let that run, so it's gone one second and it's done. If I click the little Snapshot button down here and now we have this snapshot saved. When we make any changes, we can come back to and compare, and we can get off of it by clicking the little eye down here. Now when we crank this up to six, we can compare it to a what we had earlier. Now that took 13 seconds for this little region. When I click another snapshot, and I'm just going to click back and forth between these two. You can see the difference by increasing the sampling, we're starting to get rid of those fireflies. It's not perfect yet, but it did a great job pretty much. I think for our purposes, it's going to be good enough. There's some other things we could get into the widths a lot on this. But as a general overview, you can increase the sample size here and it's going to help out a lot. If you want to evaluate this stuff further, lookup, light decay, and this is basically happening because this object, the skull is so close to these lights that the indirect light is creating all of these speckle indirect bounces off of this object. This is just so close to this object but that's not really for this. It's an advanced topic. For our purposes, increasing the sample size helped a ton. Now we can go to the render tab here, we're under rendering. If we've set our project here, you can also see under the common tab that it should be having the right file path. This is what I set up to Maya. I set the Maya folder here as the project folder. It's automatically finding the images folder in there. That's also an important part of setting up the project. Just one more thing real quick, I want to cover this other tab, AOVs, tab. If you are an advanced compositor and you're trying to learn 3D, this is basically the different render layers that Arnold uses. If you click Builtin, We have all these different aspects of a render and we can isolate them so we can activate them. It'll be included in EXR because we're using JPEG, it's not going to have anywhere to put them. You have to have EXR selected for AOVs, to work. Basically, let's choose Diffuse, Indirect, Specular, and that's probably fine. Then if we choose their own render view one more time and we get off of these snapshot view here and hit "Play". Now what we have if we go up here in the top left, we actually have each one of these. These are basically passes that in compositing, you can control each one of these elements of the render. That's specular paths actually, yeah, it looks pretty cool by itself. But anyway, so if you're into compositing, you'll want to know about these things. For our beginner purposes do not worry about it. It's advanced and you probably won't need to do that stuff till later. Basically, if this render preview looks pretty good, that's all you need and that will get you what you want out of the JPEG here. We have all this stuff set, so I'm going to close that down. We're happy with this. I'm going to close this. I'm going to go to Render and go to Render Sequence. I'm going to open this up, make sure it has the master cam double-check it says the right frame range. You can also put an alternate output file location. Sometimes I like to select the images file as well, just to be redundant in that. Definitely put it there. Sometimes I'll do that and then when I hit render sequencing close, what's going to happen is it's going to start to go through each one of the frames in this window. I won't be able to work in Maya from here on out until it's done, but it'll do it without a watermark. If you use the batch render option, it will create a watermark which I can't show you now because it's already rendering. But that's pretty much it, that's how you render sequence in Maya. I really appreciate watching this course and congratulations that you've gotten this far. I hope to see you the next sections where we're going to cover a lot of cool stuff like rigging and animation and get into some more fun things. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next section. All right. Thanks. Bye.