In the real world, objects are seen in specific ways based on the following:

• The materials they are made of.
• Their surface textures.
• How they are lit and reflect light.
• The environment surrounding them.

In Maya, you provide your surfaces and objects with these characteristics by assigning shading materials to them.

Shading Materials provide instructions to the renderer so it can simulate how the surfaces in your scene react to light and appear in the final image. Shading involves such attributes as color, transparency, shininess, and many others to create a realistic look.

Editing the material attributes associated with shading materials affects how they appear in the rendered image. In this way, Maya provides the option of allowing you to create images as they would appear in the real world or in your imagination.

In this lesson, you learn to use basic shading features to render a sphere so it appears like an orange in the final image.

In this lesson you learn how to:

• Assign a shading material with specific color and surface attributes.
• Differentiate between shading material types (Lambert, Blinn, Phong, and so on) to achieve a specific material appearance.
• Assign a label texture map to a surface.
• Use the Hypershade editor to view and work with shading materials.
• Create a bump texture map to simulate the orange’s pebbled skin.
• Control the placement of a 3D texture using a 3D manipulator.