Surface texture

 
 
 

In visual arts, a texture is any kind of surface detail, both visual and tactile. In Maya, you create surface detail with textures connected to the material of objects as texture maps. (Materials define a the basic substance of an object; see Surface shading for more details.)

For more information on texture maps, see Texture mapping.

Factors beyond basic color, transparency, and shine (see below) that determine the appearance of an object’s surface include:

You can also bake illumination and color to a texture that you can later apply to objects in a scene. See Baking illumination and color.

Color

You can work with color in Maya in so many different ways. Here are some of the most common:

Transparency

You can work with the transparency of an object in the following ways:

Specular highlight (shine)

You can work with the shininess of objects in your scene in the following ways:

What are specular highlights?

Some surfaces are shinier than others (for example a wet fish has a shinier surface than a dry leaf). Depending on how shiny a surface is, it reflects light in different ways.

Shiny objects reflect light directly; matte objects diffuse light. Specular highlights show the places on the object where the light sources are reflected at consistent angles; reflections on an object show, among other things, light bounced from surrounding objects.

Specular highlights depend directly on the view (camera), not the position of the light, like diffuse shading does.

Tip

The Blinn material is recommended for shiny surfaces in animations. Highlights on other specular materials, like Phong and PhongE, may flicker when animated.

Highlights

The size of a specular highlight on a surface makes the surface look either flat or shiny.

Highlight color

You can control the color of highlights on surfaces.

Reflections

You can control the degree of reflectivity as well as other surface properties like refracted color.