Autodesk Maya 2013 Essentials

Chapter 7

Surfacing Your Character

Thus far, your character has been a uniform gray, the default surface that the Autodesk® Maya® program assigns to all new geometry. Very few animated characters are that color, however. To change the color of your character, you’ll create shaders in a process known as surfacing.

• Creating a surface
• Laying out UVs
• Texture mapping

Creating a Surface

There are two types of surfaces you can create—ones with a uniform color, and ones that use texture maps to add some variety and detail to your character. Texture maps are covered later in the chapter, and before you can tackle texture maps, you need to know how to create surface types.

Using the Hypershade Window

The Hypershade window is a very powerful and flexible ...