Intro to Maya: Lesson 6 - Lighting and shading your rocket

Now that you’ve learned the basics of lighting and shading, let’s beautify your rocket ship from lesson 3. Before we begin, I’ll hide my deformer handles just so I don’t accidentally move them. Then I’ll go to the Rendering shelf and create a directional light… …and turn on lights, shadows, ambient occlusion, and anti-aliasing in the Viewport. And then I’ll just orient my light. For secondary lighting, I’ll switch over to the Arnold shelf and add a Skydome light. Then open the Attribute Editor and add an HDR file.

01:02 - You can find a link to this file in the description below. This time I’m going to add some extra exposure, just to brighten things up a bit more. There, now that our rocket is properly lit, we can start adding some color to it. Start by selecting the rocket, then going back to the Rendering tab Start by selecting the rocket, then going back to the Rendering tab and adding a Standard Surface material. Remember on older versions, you can use the right-click marking menu to substitute an aiStandardSurface material instead (like I showed in lesson 5).

01:32 - We’ll rename this material “rocket_body_MAT”, then give it the Car_Paint treatment in a very light grey. Of course, this applies the same material to my entire rocket, giving it this strange kind of liquid-metaly look. So I’m going to hold the right mouse button and go to Face component mode - remember, a blue mesh shows I’m in component mode. Then I’ll carefully select the faces of the nose cone… …and create another standard surface shader. Once again, I’ll give it the Car_Paint preset, this time in a bright hot-rod red.

02:10 - And just to make it stand out even more, I’ll crank up the metalness and Base color Weight to make it really reflective. And now I have two distinct materials on the same mesh! Let’s just rename the new one “rocket_red_MAT”. Looking at this, I think I’d like the same color for my fins too, so I’ll go back into Face mode and carefully select all the fins faces. A combination of the Lasso Tool and Symmetry can make this easier. Rather than making another red material, I can just re-use the same one by holding the right mouse button and going to Assign Existing Material > rocket_red_MAT.

03:08 - Next, I’ll select my booster faces and add another standard surface shader, which I’ll call booster_MAT This time I’ll go with a less reflective “ceramic” preset to start. However, I’ll dial down the specular and assign it a very dark grey just to differentiate it from the body. For the portholes, I’ll assign them two colors: one for the inner porthole, and one for the rim. For the portholes, I’ll assign them two colors: one for the inner porthole, and one for the rim. To select the faces for the inner porthole, I’m actually going to start with Vertex mode this time, then select the single vertex at the center.

03:46 - Then, I’ll expand my selection outward by one row with “Shift +.” (AKA “>”). Then, I’ll expand my selection outward by one row with “Shift +.” (AKA “>”). Then, I’ll expand my selection outward by one row with “Shift +.” (AKA “>”). Now with this selection of vertices, I can go to Select > Convert Selection > To Faces, which selects all the adjacent faces! And then I’ll create another new material called “porthole_inner_MAT”. Again, I’ll use a “car_paint” preset. Then I’ll do the same thing to the upper porthole.

04:15 - Note that you can also find selection conversion settings in the Ctrl + right mouse marking menu for easier access. Or you can just press Ctrl + F11. Finally, to apply a material to the porthole rims, I’ll go to face selection mode and select any face in the middle row… …then Shift + double-click one next to it to select the entire face loop. Again I’ll use “Shift +.” to expand the selection to adjacent faces, before applying one last shader. I’ll call it “porthole_rim_MAT”, then use the ceramic preset again. Finally I’ll color it a dark grey, with some metalness, decreased specularity, and roughness to give it a more “brushed metal” look.

05:08 - And then I’ll apply it to the other one as well. And there you go! For those of you in a hurry, you already have something good enough for animation and rendering! But for those of you with a bit more time, let me give you a taste of some more advanced techniques. So thanks to our skydome light, we’re getting some really nice reflections on our model. In fact, I’d almost argue they’re too nice. Very few surfaces are this perfect. To make it a bit more imperfect, I’m going to go to my rocket_red_MAT and scroll down to the Geometry section in the Attribute Editor.

05:51 - I’m going to add a Bump Map, which is exactly what it sounds like – it’ll add “bumps” to my material for some additional texture. As I showed in lesson 5, I can click this palette button to connect a pattern… As I showed in lesson 5, I can click this palette button to connect a pattern… …and in this case, I’ll use some noise. Off the bat this seems to add a LOT of bumpiness. I’m going to reduce the Bump Depth to 0.1. Then I’ll click the input button here to go to the noise feeding my Bump Value. In here, I’ll first change my Noise Type to “Wispy”, then lower the amplitude to make the effect very subtle.

06:24 - And now if I move the camera compared to before, you can see how the reflections wobble a bit – as if the metal has some imperfections in it. Notice that those imperfections are carried over automatically to my fins as well since they use the same material. By the way, to better visualize how all these connections work, you can use the Hypershade. By the way, to better visualize how all these connections work, you can use the Hypershade. This is your one stop shop for building materials, much like the Viewport is your one stop shop for building models.

06:49 - Up here in the Materials tab you can find a list of all your materials at all times. And there’s even this handy little “mini-Attribute Editor” you can use instead of the one in the Viewport. I can even change the little preview object up here as well. But the real power of the Hypershade comes from selecting a material – like my rocket_red_MAT, and then clicking the “Show Inputs” button down here. This shows me what’s called a “shading graph”- that is, a visual representation of my material.

07:24 - Here I can very clearly see my noise feeding into a bump and then feeding into my material via the “Normal Camera” attribute. This is the connection that Maya created when I assigned my bump map. I can drag on this connection to disconnect it… or reconnect it at will. This is great for quick comparisons or experimentation. To show you this in action, let’s add a coat of dirt on top of the shader as well, by going down to the “coat” section and again connecting some noise to the Color attribute here.

08:00 - As soon as I do that, Maya adds a second noise node to the Hypershade, which you can see feeding into the shader’s Coat Color. Then I can adjust exactly how much dirt to apply. Notice I always have the option to work from either the Viewport or Hypershade – whichever I find more convenient at a given time. So just to hammer home this workflow one more time, let’s assign some bump mapping to the booster. Just like the rocket red I’ll go down to the Geometry section and add a Bump Map with some Noise…

08:46 - …then go back to the Hypershade, select the material, and show its inputs. And from here I can adjust either the bump depth, or the noise pattern. This time I’ll skip the dirt since this part’s already pretty dark. So that’s the basic use of the Hypershade, but with just a bit of out-of-the-box thinking, I can do way more powerful things with it. For my final example, let’s assign a texture to the main body material… … by clicking the palette button next to Base Color and loading a file. You can find the texture linked below. This adds a paneled metal texture to my rocket. However, at a first glance it looks very flat. Just like the red areas or the booster, this needs some bump mapping to it. But in this case I don’t want to apply just random noise.

09:43 - Instead, I’d like the bumps to match up with my paneled texture. So let’s first create a bump node manually in the Hypershade by pressing Tab and then typing “Bump”. I’ll plug that into the “Normal Camera” just like we saw before. Only this time, I’ll steal the “Out Alpha” directly from the same file providing my texture map and plug it straight into my bump map. Suddenly you can see that my model looks bumpy in exactly the spots where the panels are! Of course, the effect is a bit too pronounced, so I’ll just dial down the bump effect.

10:26 - And now I can see how the light plays off the bumpy texture, adding another layer of depth and believability to my model. Similar to that, I can show inputs for multiple materials at the same time: in this case my red and body… Then I can steal the coat of dirt from my red and apply it straight to my body! As with the modeling lesson, this is just a taste of what you can do with lighting and shading in Maya. To apply what you’ve learned, why not try creating some windows out of half-spheres, then adding glass materials to them? Or add a new material to the bottom of the booster to make it look more rocket-like. And if you liked what you saw here, please remember to comment and subscribe to the Maya Learning Channel. It helps me figure out what kind of material is popular so I can make more in the future! .