The Journey to Texturing...

For this week, we are finally beginning to do some proper texturing!

The first thing that was introduced to us was the hypershade window, which is an important window for us to manage our materials. We also learnt about connecting nodes, which can be quite useful. For example, we can use the window to basically connect a texture node to a material node, so that all the objects using that material would have the new texture applied.

We have already learnt about materials before, and we have also used textures, which serves as a guide, in order to draw our curve profile in previous labs as well. Therefore, making this sphere, which just require us to create a new material and apply a favourite texture of ours, wasn't really too difficult.

(click picture to see the enlarged version)

Next was the dice texturing. I find this video tutorial rather useful because I would most likely be using this technique for my Assignment 1. Basically, what happens is that in order to put texture onto our 3D object, we have to "open up" the faces and place them on a flat 2d surface. This is known as UV mapping. We can then use photoshop or other image editor to make our texture that accommodates to the UV map so that the texture shows up properly for each faces.

Other video tutorials use built-in textures that are provided by Maya instead of using external image files, which I don't think I will use them for my alarm clock because the built-in textures doesn't have the image that I want for my clock.

(click picture to see the enlarged version)

The final video tutorial was to make a chrome sphere. This is where the built-in ramp texture is used in order to create the "chrome effect" on our sphere. The video tutorial also taught us about using point light and ambient light in order to lit up the scene when we render it.

(click pictures to see the enlarged version)