#22 - Materials - Modelling Techniques 5

In this post I will show how my first attempt using materials went. The first exercise was to create a material using specular shading. I initially decided to use a cube as my object for the material., but this caused a problem because of the shape. The reflections were simply not noticeable on it, and I spent ages trying to make it shinier but it was seemingly impossible. I then used a sphere instead, and the difference was significant. Because the light was now reflecting off a round surface you can see the reflections much more clearly, giving it that shiny effect. I also had a large problem when trying to render the scene. When selecting render the current frame option, the Arnold rendering would only give me a black screen, and after about 20 minutes of Googling solutions, one of which worked for me, I tried using the Maya Hardware renderer instead and fortunately that one worked. So, for now I cannot use Arnold. Finally, I could see the rendered version of my object and the noticeable difference in the shading. Here it is before rendering with the settings I used:

And here it is rendered:

Rendering issues aside, I am now comfortable with using the specular shading settings. I created a sufficiently shiny orb, and have at least one working renderer for now. Next time I will know which settings to use and won't have to repeat the long challenge of viewing my object.

Next, I attempted to apply a bitmap. This was quite easy really; no problems were encountered now that the renderer is sorted. I just applied a new Lambert to the cube, selected the file option, added the provided file, then added an existing texture to the other five objects. As you can see the cone and the pyramid do not look quite right with the default texture mapping, and the cone is a bit awkward as well around the circumference. This will be fixed later on using UV mapping.

After experimenting with many of the procedural maps it is clear that they each have different settings based on what they are likely to be used to texture. For example, the ocean map has wave height and spread settings, and the Brownian map has octaves, and the fractal map has threshold and frequency settings. Evidently, they are designed as pre-sets for specific types of models. When I tried using the cloud map a box appeared and I have no idea what it is for but the others don't seem to have it. The ocean map has all sorts of different options to control the waves, however I was unable to change the colour from grey. I tried editing the colour balance settings but nothing was changing. Nonetheless, I am now aware of the various procedural maps I can use to texture all sorts of different things like water, clouds, rocks, etc.

Finally, I have created a material that uses bump mapping, and I also tried to use displacement mapping but I'm not sure if it even works. The displacement texture is applied but it's either really hard to see the difference or it isn't working for some reason which I cannot figure out just yet. Either way, here is the bump map on the left and the possible displacement map on the right, and for my Star Wars models it is highly unlikely that I will use a displacement map anyway as none of my ships will be close enough to the camera that a bump map will not suffice.

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