Datasheet

20 Chapter 1: Texturing and Lighting a Product, Part 1
time across the surface in the U and V directions. Additionally, the 2d Placement utility
node offers attributes to offset, mirror, or rotate the procedural pattern.
Note that two naming conventions are applied to any
given node in Maya: a “nice” name and a “long” name.
A nice name includes spaces and features capitalization.
A long name carries no spaces and sometimes features a
different word order. For example, 2d Placement is a nice
name while place2dTexture is a long name. Nevertheless,
2d Placement and place2dTexture refer to the same node.
The Hypershade work area uses the long naming conven-
tion to label the node icons. The Hypershade Create tab
node list, however, uses the nice naming comvention.
In contrast to procedural textures, several 2D textures are based on
bitmaps imported by the user; these include File, Movie, and PSD File.
When mapped to an attribute, a bitmap-based 2D texture is connected to
its own 2d Placement utility node.
When a 3D procedural texture is mapped to an attribute, a 3d
Placement utility node is connected to the shading network. The node is
visible in each view panel as a green placement box (see Figure 1.22). By
default, the box is placed at 0, 0, 0 and is 2×2×2 units in size. The utility
determines the color of each assigned surface point by locating the point’s
position within or relative to the placement box. This process is analogous
to a surface dipped into a square bucket of swirled paint or a surface chis-
eled from a solid cube of veined stone. Hence, the scale, translation, and
Figure 1.20
Filter Size is set to 32,
and Shadow Color is
set to a light blue. A
sample file is saved
as headphones
-step5.ma on
the DVD.
Figure 1.21
(Top) A 2d Placement utility node, auto-
matically named place2dTexture1, con-
nected to a Noise texture node. (Bottom)
The utility’s UV tiling attributes
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