Datasheet

28 Chapter 1: Texturing and Lighting a Product, Part 1
and browsing for the Project1 folder whether the folder remains at its original location on the
DVD or is located on a drive after the DVD contents have been copied.
When creating custom bitmaps, you’re not limited to color. For example, you can cre-
ate the illusion that the plastic junction is composed of two halves with a central groove
by painting a new texture and mapping it to the Bump Mapping attribute of the associ-
ated material. The groove requires a black line on the texture while the unaffected areas
are fi lled with 50 percent gray (see Figure 1.32).
When painting the bump map texture, it may be diffi cult to determine where the
groove should be positioned in relation to the UV snapshot. To make this process easier,
you can follow these steps:
1. In a Maya view panel, RMB+click the Junction_L or Junction_R surface and choose
Face from the marking menu. Proceed to Shift+click the faces that would make a
suitable location for the groove.
2. Open the UV Texture Editor. The selected faces will be isolated. Make a note of the
face locations within the UV texture space. If need be, you can switch back and forth
between Maya and Photoshop while painting the texture.
3. Even though the anti-aliasing quality has been set to high, you may notice that small
details appear soft. In part, this is because of the automatic activation of the Use Multi
Pixel Filter attribute. Multi-pixel filtering averages the pixels within a render as a post-
process. This helps prevent anti-aliasing issues such as stair-stepping. Unless the ren-
der is destined for video output, however, the filtering can make the render excessively
blurry. You can turn off the filtering by deselecting the Use Multi Pixel Filter check
box in the Maya Software tab of the Render Settings window.
Other parts of the headphones model can benefi t from custom bitmaps mapped to
Color attributes. For example, the plastic ear cups are a suitable location for a large logo
(see Figure 1.33). To create such a bitmap, you can follow steps similar to those listed at
the beginning of this section.
Figure 1.32
(Left) Custom bump
texture. (Right) Junc-
tion rendered with
a bumped groove
along the side. A
sample file is saved
as headphones
-step9.ma. A finished
texture is included
as Junction_Bump.
tga in the Project
Files/Project1/
Textures folder on
the DVD.
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