Day 129

Now to add some extra oomph. Above you see the ambient occlusion shadows. Any place where two edges meet gets a little less light. I've used this before but only in a superficial way. Maya can render out the shadows but it takes a little time, especially if you want to render out shots at different angles. What I did before was render out something like you see above. Then I'd render out the same image with its normal colors and textures. Then I'd take those two images and combine them together in Photoshop. Not a bad thing to do if you want one image, but it's not very efficient if you want more.

The book showed me a better method. Maya can render out the shadows and covert them directly into textures. So I end up with a bunch of images you see above. And guess what, they're all arranged in the maps I made before. So I can take these shadow maps and combine them with the color texture maps in Photoshop. Now the textures will have the shadows built in and Maya won't need to render them out every time.

So I've gone over creating color texture maps but there are so many other kinds of maps like transparency. Now I can finally make the glass for the windows. Using the general map of the glass I made awhile ago, I created the color map above on the left. Next I'll create a transparency map. Anything black will be transparent, white will be opaque and gray can be anything in between. So I just took my color map, changed it into black and white, and then inverted it to get the above right.

Then I apply both the color and transparency map to the glass and I get the above image. So the white parts on the color map get ignored because the transparency map tells Maya that that part is transparent. I put the ball outside the window to show that the windows are see through and not just black. The ball looks kind of like a creepy perv.

Another type of map is a bump map. It makes flat things not look flat. I'm not exactly sure how it works but the results are above. I had to download another program to make the bump map. I fed the program my color map and it makes a bump map out of it. It's not a surefire method so the program has a lot of settings to tweak to get the right look. Below is what the map actually looks like.

I made a bump map for the furniture and window frames. I tried making one for the walls and floor but for some reason, it wasn't turning out right so I left it out for the time being.