Specialized Materials and Material Effects ◾ 339
also a bit brownish), then gradually turning
to a cool blue above. e orange and yellow
“sunset” sky in Figure 1.2 (see p. CI-2 of
Color Insert) was created with soware and
is another typical sky dome.
The Rendering
Figure 12.22 shows the nal result. e
foreground is textured with an image of
dried dirt. Behind it are the sidewalk and
the road. Notice how the sky looks warmer
closer to the horizon.
BAKING A MATERIAL
It can take a lot of render time to calculate the appearance of a material on an object in
a Maya scene. But we can have Maya calculate the complex interaction between lights in
a scene and a material that has been placed on an object. en we have Maya “bake” the
result into a le texture. is texture will render far more quickly, and so the process of
rendering many frames can be reduced to a small fraction of the time that would have been
otherwise required.
In Figure12.23 we see a version of our Moai model. It is an orange color that is partly
transparent. It is being rendered with the Maya Soware renderer, and the raytracing sliders
in the Render Settings have been set to Reections=1, Refractions = 6, and Shadows=2.
Rendering this single-frame image took just
over 15 seconds on an iMac with 16 giga-
bytes of memory, a quad-core i7, and an
NVIDIA graphics card with two gigabytes
of dedicated memory.
en, the Moai model in the Main
Window and the transparent material in
the Hypershade were Shi-selected. As seen
in Figure12.24, we chose:
Hypershade Main Menu → Edit → Convert
to File Texture (Maya Soware)
e render shown in Figure 2.25 was
instantaneous, even with the Moai copied
and pasted to make a duplicate.
e downside of this is that the way the
material and light on the Moai interact with
each other is now frozen. And this specic
technique does not work with mental ray.
FIGURE 12.22 (See p. CI-13 of Color Insert)
e street on the horizon.
FIGURE 12.23 (See p. CI-4 of Color Insert) A
complex material and light eect.
340 ◾ 3D Animation for the Raw Beginner Using Maya
A HOMEMADE SKY DOME
e background in the render seen in Figures12.23 and 12.25 shows a homemade sky
dome. e Moai was placed inside a huge polygon sphere, and then a ramp texture was
applied to the sphere. e ramp texture is shown in Figure12.26. By using multiple shades
of blue, along with white and tan, we were able to approximate the appearance we would
have gotten by using the mental ray Sun and Sky.
FIGURE 12.24 Baking to a le texture.
FIGURE 12.25 e baked texture in use. FIGURE 12.26 e sky dome texture.
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