Maya texturing books

[razorback]

For something like texturing, i cant really recommend any books. the closest thing i had when i started doing texturing was the maya help files (F1). The books can tell you all they want, but you wont know that you got it right till you see it. so heres something i hope you can start off on, until you find some good reference...

1. Learn the basic shaders in the hypershade, to be totally honest, most stuff can be rendered in maya using the blinn shader. look it up, and find out what ambient, diffuse and specular mean, and how they effect a surface. learn how to use the file node. coz you can get around using procedurals later, this is just to start u off..
2. By this point you would have used some lights, experiment with the different lights and their attributes...
3. learn the UV Texture editor, and how to get stuff in the right place using the polygon UV unwraps...
4. once you've gotten pretty familiar with the whole process, of found a pipeline that fits you, go back and look into the more complicated stuff ... procedural textures, utilities, and how to connect them to give different effects, at the same time learn how to use to lights to your best advantage, attentuation, fall off, shadows...
5. then once you think you know your way around the hyper shade and rendering option, take the plunge into the evil yet necessary world of mental ray..


But if you must buy a book, i would recommend you look at Jae-Jin Choi's Maya Character Animation. Its a very good reference, all round. it covers everything from modelling down to rendering and compositing, in pretty good detail. Just bare in mind that everything there is applicable to Maya's scanline renderer. MR at the moment is still abit of a black art/nuclear science. drop by the Maya Rendering forum here, theres lotsa good ppl around to point u in the right direction... :)

Good luck

[FibreOptix]

3. learn the UV Texture editor, and how to get stuff in the right place using the polygon UV unwraps...

Good luck
Bingo. This is where I'm stuck. I'm trying to texture a poly-model t-REX. I layed out the UVs and applied a bump map. But the grooves look stretched and blotchy. Not fine like I intended.

Also things are not lining up. I Layed the UVs out as top of trex and bottom of trex. But it does'nt look good. I read some where you can add multiple UV maps to a single model. THAT's what I need (head, torso, tail, legs and arms textured seperately) to give a more detailed map.

But I can't find tuts or books on the subject.

Thanks for your help any way.

[Panupat]

there's no good UV books that I remembered. You might want to check out Gnomone or Digital Tutor or Learning Maya instead. Their UV instructions are pretty good for beginners.

[Goon]

[Digital] Texturing and Painting is the only Maya focused book solely on texturing that I know of. And it isn't great. You will learn very little actual technical details from it, and probably very little abstract knowledge as well.

[MunCHeR]

the lost pencil maya apprenticeship explained UV editing pretty well for me, to watch someone texture a model from start to finish is the only way to go, and reasonably priced for the content you get:

www.lostpencil.com

Good luck

MunCH

[NitroLiq]

You can also check out some of the video tutorials at simplymaya.com. There are quite a few large scale projects that cover modeling and texturing.

[Rex3d]

As a beginner I got a lot of good info on texturing from the 4 Gnomon texturing DVDs they have. Changed the look of my objects immediately. I found all four of my DVDs on ebay fairly cheap (at least compared to full price). There is a lot of info in the DVDs, and I find that after a few weeks I go back and get even more out of 'em.

Hope this helps...

[boboroshi]

The Learnign Maya | Rendering book i have for Maya 4 has a chapter on how to do poly mapping. It's pretty much experimentation from there.

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