Maya Tutorials: Lighting, Shading and Texturing Part One

    Soon after affirming everything with the UV mapping tutorial I looked at the lighting tutorial given that I had left the pencil characters on my home PC. One of the biggest adaptation obstacles was the scale differences between my and the tutorial deomosntration's sets, as you can see mine is firmly within the Maya grid with some extra space whilist the tutorial's was as wide as the grid itself, which presented a few problems with the lighting intensity (as shown in one image, what was okay for the ideo was retina-burning when I put the value in, so I had to scale down my values by factors of between 10 and 100 deppending on the diffusion factor, which in hindsight I think may have dulled the lighting sheen on the lamp-post but I think it turned out okay in the end. There might be slight hints of shadows that I never saw come up in the tutorial though but I assume it was because of the size and intensity of the light sphere on a smaller environment.

    Back to the pencil and eraser man. One thing that I quickly adapted to was applying shaders in an assembly line fashion which I think made production slightly faster as I applied the mouth interiors, the eye whites and the pupil colours to both characters when I had the respective shader selected. I am finding it slightly annoying that the selection tool keeps reverting to select edge loop after a few clicks. Rather than the repeat button (G), I learned to use the hotkey for "grow selection" tool originally when working on the beam for the digital set and feels like a useful time-shaving technique in comparison to >/"select ->grow selection" + G and repeat. I mearly, nearly up to speed with tutorials now after a brief panic I was falling behind.