Putting Textures into The Models

Earlier on we created models such as the cardboard and the bucket. I merely put coloured lambert materials onto them and call it a day. This time the models will be painted in wood, granite, and other awesome textures.

Process
It was just a simple and similar procedures for all of the models. Firstly, a new material is assigned to the models, and then we tweak the material's properties. We will also connect the materials to texture nodes such as wood, granite or even use some of the image files provided. That was all it was required to apply some nice textures down, so this exercise was pretty simple.

(click pictures to see the enlarged version)

Compared to my old version of the cardboard, this textured version looks more shiny because I used blinn instead of lambert. Other than that, I really don't see a big difference...

(click picture to see the enlarged version)

For the bucket, besides applying the ramp texture, we also need to tweak the UV mapping of the cylinder because the texture right now is wrapping around the edges of all the faces, instead of flowing smoothly from top to bottom. We used cylinder mapping because it fits most closely to our bucket mesh.

(click picture to see the enlarged version)

Without using cylinder mapping. The texture is applied individually to each faces.

(click picture to see the enlarged version)

Using cylinder mapping allows our texture to map correctly on the bucket.

For the track, we not only use the Ramp texture, we went further and add the noise texture on top of it, so that it will make the track look older.

(click picture to see the enlarged version)

Before adding Noise

(click picture to see the enlarged version)

After adding Noise

The washboard's wood was the same as what was done for the blocks previously... except that the glass for the washboard had bump mapping applied to it.

One thing that was kind of bothering me was the jagged edges that I see on both the perspective view and the rendering. Tried tweaking various properties in the rendering settings, but it seems that there's still no anti-aliasing applied. Went to search in the internet for some tips but they turn out not working either.

In the end, I decided to just render an extremely big picture, then I resize it to a smaller resolution (this is actually the method that graphics programmers use to implement multisample anti-aliasing in their 3d programs). The image below was originally at 1920 by 1080, something that was so big that my screen can't even show the whole thing, then I resize the window to make it smaller, and tada, no more jagged edges:

(click picture to see the enlarged version)

Reflection
These short tutorials were relatively easy to do,  but they have shown several ways of using built-in textures provided by Maya such as Wood and Ramp texture, which I thought it was rather creative. I think I still prefer just applying an external image file as a texture for my Assignment's 1 clock model though, because I think that would be much more easier, and the words on the clock cannot be created using Maya's built-in textures.