Advanced Maya Texturing and Lighting- P8: I should stress that I am self-taught. In 1994, I sat down at a spare seat of Alias PowerAnimator and started hacking away. After several years and various trials by fire, 3D became a livelihood, a love, and an obsession. Along the way, I was fortunate enough to work with many talented artists at Buena Vista Visual Effects and Pacific Data Images. In 2000, I switched from PowerAnimator to Maya and have since logged tens of thousands of hours with the subject of this book | Figure Two textures are blended together with a Remap Value utility. This scene is included on the CD as . 189 SHIFTING COLORS Smearing Colors The Smear utility allows one texture to be distorted by another. If Smear is combined with a Ramp texture it creates a stylized vision effect that might be appropriate for an alien a monster or a robot. For example in Figure a sequence of video images is loaded into a File texture. The Use Image Sequence attribute is checked so that the images are automatically loaded as the Timeline moves forward. The outColor of the file node is connected to the inRgb of a smear node. The outU of the smear node is connected to the offsetU of the place2dTexture node of a ramp texture node. The outV of the smear node is also connected to the offsetV of the place2dTexture node of the ramp node. The outColor of the ramp node is finally connected to the outColor of a surfaceShader material node which is assigned to a primitive plane. The ramp has three handles one red and two orange. The higher the values are in the video image bitmaps the farther the smear node pulls the ramp down in the V direction. For instance if a bitmap provides a pixel with RGB values the ramp is pulled downward so that the top rests at the center of the ramp field. If a bitmap provides a pixel with RGB values the ramp is pulled downward so that the top rests one tenth above the bottom of the ramp field. When the ramp is called upon by the surfaceShader material every pixel of the ramp is offset in the V direction by a unique amount. Hence the ramp appears as a colored version of the video bitmap. 190 CHAPTER 6 CREATING CUSTOM CONNECTIONS AND APPLYING COLOR UTILITIES Figure An image sequence and a Ramp texture are combined with the Smear utility. This scene is included on the CD as . A QuickTime movie is included as . Internally the Smear utility converts the input RGB to HSV. New UV coordinates are .
