Week 7-Hypershade tutorial

In this tutorial, I learned about the process of starting to create a texture or shader for objects in Maya. The audio wasn't synced with the video, but I learned a lot and it was exactly the knowledge I needed. It was a brief introduction to the Hypershade window.

The version of Maya used in the tutorial looked like Maya 2010. I still thought it would be helpful even though I have Maya 2011. The narrator located the Hypershade button in Maya 2010 to display the Hypershade window in the left hand side of Maya underneath all the movement commands. However, I located the Hypershade window in my version under the Windows Tab on the menu Bar, under Rendering Editors, and Hypershade.

I noticed another difference between Maya 2010 and 2011. In 2010, the Hypershade window was called Hypershade/Perspective. In 2011, Hypershade has its own window and Perspective is paired with UV Texture Editor.

The tutorial demonstrates the layout of the window. One can choose a node of surfaces or shaders, and  textures, among others, to develop on the left panel. Some of these include Anisotropic, Blinn, Lambert, Layered Shader, Phong, Phong E, and a Ramp Shader.  I knew before that different materials could be accessed within this window, but all I knew how to do was change the color. The recent materials are located in the top right-hand box and the work area is in the lower right-hand box, where the changes made to the material appear including the links of the layers for the material.

Different textures and shaders are unique based on their ability to reflect light, what the narrator calls Specularity. An Anisotropic surface material is common for hair texturing, where the light takes on a curved quality. Blinn materials have light that is distributed and looks more dull than the Anisotropic material. It is recommended by the narrator to use for metal objects in Maya. A Lambert is defined as a mundane shader with barely any light relection and can be used to shade things such as human skin, grass, or carpet, among other things. A Layered Shader is one that contains materials stacked right on top of each other. Phong and Phong E can be implemented for plastic or glass-like objects and have significant light reflection. Phong E is related closely to the Blinn material. Lastly, a Ramp Shader provides the option of a self-made color palette to attribute to an object. The attributes of these materials can be tweaked within the Attribute Editor, which I already knew.

This website has the tutorial I watched.
http://vimeo.com/754556