From the course: Alias Essential Training

Multicolor shading - Alias Tutorial

From the course: Alias Essential Training

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Multicolor shading

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- During the course of this modeling exercise, we've been creating some wireframes, we've been looking at control points and holds. We've also been jumping into shading. I'm going to open up Diagnostic Shading here. I'm going to show you some other options that we have in the Multicolor Shader, that can give you a little bit more of an intuitive result as to the quality of the surface. Again, there are better ways to really interrogate deep into the continuity of a surface. But this just takes it to the next level. We've been using the standard shader, like this. I'm just going to zoom into this a little bit. Let's take a look at some of the options. We can change the color of this simply by just clicking on these color swatches in here. But typically, what I find is that most people will either use the blue or the gray for their shading, like this. Once you've got that selected, we can darken that shader, or we can lighten it, like so. The top portion above this line really goes towards the quality of the shading itself. If you want a good quality shade, you can change the tolerance down to .01, like so. You can also switch to Accurate. We go to Fast, and we change this back up to, let's say, something like .1, you'll notice that the highlights here are quite blotchy. Again, dial them back to .01, accurate, and that will improve them quite considerably. You can take this down to .001. But just be careful if you do that to make sure you take it back to something like .1, because that's going to be quite intensive on the process as you manipulate the parts. Don't worry about Limit Edge Length and Layers. We're not going to touch those right now. Now, everything below here allows us to change, again, as we mentioned, the color, the specularity intensity ... So if I change the intensity up like this, you can see the specularity, or the intensity, of those highlights are changing. Take that back down to something like this. We can make this surface transparence. By the way, this is different to transparency in the control panel for surfaces. This one just refers to the wireframe, like that. And the light intensity. Right now, we can change the light intensity. Just be careful with this. It can bleach out your part very easily. Okay. The other very important part of this Multicolor Shader is Show Orientation. If we're going to go into some high quality rendering using ray tracing et cetera, we need to make sure that the orientation of our surfaces are all aligned correctly. Now, this tells us that the normals for the yellow surfaces are pointing in a different direction to the normal of the gray surfaces. What we would like to see here is everything the same color. And the color we want to see here, in this particular case, is gray. So let's go to Surface Edit, Orientation, Set Surface Orientation, and all we have to do, very simply, is just window over those entities. We want to make everything the same color from our viewpoint. If I switch this off now, you'll notice that, a better result. Now, this really takes effect when you're going to start applying more layered textures or more complex textures. But for the moment, just understand that, if we are going to go into that mode, we have to check surface orientation. It becomes very important in some of these other options, as well. The other thing we can do now is, we can switch on reflections. If I slide down to the bottom, you can see we have a whole selection of environments that we can reflect into our part. Now, I'm going to select Hall. Now, you'll notice there's a bug here. If your part does this, just go in there and just move the specularity just a fraction to reinvoke the command. As I rotate this, you can see that we are actually reflecting something into our part. In this case, it's an image of a hall. Let's go ahead and take off the model. We can also change the amount of reflectivity to give us the desired result. We can also change the color. In some cases, different settings will give you better results. If we change from Hall, for example, to Evaluation, again, we have this bug, so I just change specularity a touch and we're going to switch off the model again, and it's changed the intensity of the color, like this. This will give you a slightly different way to evaluate this part. Again, gives you a good start. But there are more complex ways and more accurate ways to check evaluation of the surface. Finally, we have the option to Link Light Camera. At the moment, the light source is from my viewpoint. It's pointing straight at the model from my viewpoint. If I uncheck this, and I'm just going to pull the palette up a fraction, I can actually grab hold of this marker, and I have now full control of the light source. It's almost the same as me picking up a torch and shining it onto the model. In some case, this gives you a better analysis than Link Light to Camera. But if I do this, and this is the one that you'd use most of the time, the light source now is coming straight from my camera or my view perspective.

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