Texture painting tips and workflow

• You can paint on 3d objects in Maya and Phototshop
• Use a variety of brush shapes
• Use a variety of opacities 
• Sample from existing textures with the clone and pattern stamp tools
• Blend layers on top of each other
• Paint texture guides in advance in Maya
• Use a wacom tablet
• Use photoshop brush textures
• Use crazy bump to generate normal and spec maps
• Use high quality rendering and lighting in Maya to see normal and spec.

Workflow

1. Layout UV's
2. Paint base colors in 3d (optional)
3. Perform UV snapshot and/or establish photoshop network
4. bring snapshot into Illustrator for vector work
5. add new layers in photoshop, begin painting base texture patterns using guides
6. add new layers in photoshop, sample and clone from source material
7. blend layers together using blend modes and opacity changes
8. save PSD, update network in Maya
9. Correct texture seams using Maya or Photoshop 3d paint
10. use final color map to generate spec and normal maps using crazy bump.

Week 3 lecture

• creating photoshop networks
• painting textures in photoshop
• process:
• establish base color layers
• sample (clone) patterns from image files
• blend
• on 2d image
• on 3d object
• painting textures in maya
• using 3d paint tool to establish texture guides
• removing texture seams
• offset filter
• live 3d cloning
• blending procedurals and bitmaps
• crazy bump
• intro to Mental Ray

Project 2 - Battle Scene

https://www.dropbox.com/s/gqg1esnu3tdm4x7/battleScene.mb

Project 1 details

To submit:

• 1 rendered image at 1280 x 720 resolution - JPG
• Maya scene
• Textures

Details:

• make a floor plane and use color and bump maps to texture it
• Apple should have procedural color and specular maps
• Use layered texture with ramp, fractal and cloud textures for the material's color
• Change blend mode to multiply for each layer except the bottom
• Reduce alpha of each until balanced
• Feel free to connect either the cloud or fractal to the specular color of the material.
• Book should have bitmap color and bump maps
• book should have a logo and leather or fabric material
• Cup should have color map
• cup should have logo, name and some dirt/grime painted on
• Render scene with three-point lighting and raytraced shadows
• Key light = warm directional light, which casts raytraced shadows, high intensity
• Fill light = cool point light, no shadows, lower intensity
• Rim light = spot light
• ray traced shadows can be activated in the Maya Software section of the render settings.
• open your rendered image in photoshop and look at the histogram to view light/dark balance

Directory structure for Project 1 submission

• /Greg Lemon
• /Project 1
• /renders
• project1_render.jpg
• /textures
• cup_color.png
• cup_bump.png
• etc...
• scene.mb

Shader naming conventions:

All shaders should be named "MAT_objectName", where object name is replaced by book, cup, etc

All external texture files should be named "objectName_color", "objectName_bump", etc. 

Final render look

Greg's work

http://greglemon.com/

http://greglemon.tumblr.com/