Maya: Advanced Materials

Maya is an industry leader in 3D materials and shaders. In this course, learn how to create convincing physically based materials in Maya.

Introduction

• Introducing Maya: Advanced materials
• Using the exercise files

1. Hypershade Tips and Tricks

• Options for node creation
• Optimizing performance
• Setting renderer attributes
• Previewing with interactive production rendering
• Graphing networks
• Binding hotkeys
• Displaying attributes and node names
• Filtering nodes and searching attributes
• Working with node presets
• Organizing materials with bins

2. Standard Surface Physical Materials

• Rendering the standard surface material
• Balancing reflections with Specular Roughness
• Using IOR to control reflectivity
• Adjusting metalness
• Stretching highlights with Anisotropy
• Mapping floating-point attributes such as base weight
• Adding another specular layer with coat

3. Ray Tracing and Geometry

• Translucency with subsurface scattering
• Light emission from a surface
• Controlling transparency with Transmission
• Tinting transparency with Transmission Depth
• Translucency with Transmission Scatter
• Assigning materials to polygon faces
• Rendering thin-walled geometry
• Cutout mapping with opacity

4. Surface Relief

• Bump mapping
• Normal mapping
• Prepping level-of-detail models
• Simulating detail with Transfer Maps
• Deforming a surface with displacement

Conclusion

• Next steps