Datasheet

2D and 3D Procedural Textures  19
the light is encoded in various shades of gray; surfaces close to the light receive higher val-
ues, and surfaces far from the light receive lower values.
If there is only one light in a scene, the shadow renders black. You can add a fi ll light to
brighten the shadow. However, the fi ll light will also brighten the unshadowed area of the
surface. An alternative solution is to adjust the light’s Shadow Color attribute. For example,
in Figure 1.20, Shadow Color is set to a light blue. In this case, Filter Size is set to 32.
2D and 3D Procedural Textures
Maya provides a number of textures that are procedural. A procedural texture is one that is
mathematically generated through a predefi ned algorithm. Procedural textures are reso-
lution independent and do not have defi ned edges or borders. The textures fall into two
categories: 2D and 3D.
2D procedural textures create a pattern in two dimensions: U (left/right) and V (down/
up). These textures include Bulge, Checker, Cloth, Fractal, Grid, Mountain, Noise, Ramp,
and Water. When you map a 2D texture to the attribute of a material, two nodes are cre-
ated and connected to the material node. The fi rst node is the texture node, which car-
ries the attributes that determine the quality of the texture. Because several procedural
textures are based on fractal noise patterns, a number of attributes are shared. The second
added node is a 2d Placement utility node (see Figure 1.21). This node controls the UV
tiling of the texture. If the node’s Repeat UV attribute is set to 1, 1, the texture appears one
Figure 1.19
(Left) Detail of depth
map shadow with
default 512 Resolu-
tion. (Right)
Improved shadow
with 2048 Resolution.
A sample file is saved
as headphones
-step4.ma on
the DVD.
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