Texturing eyes - Maya Tutorial

- Let's go ahead and move to to texturing the eyes. Now, the eyes actually do need a texture map, and we can do this in a number of ways. We can actually paint one in Photoshop, or we could model actual pupils for the eye. But I'm going to do this in actually a fairly simple way. We're just going to create simple cartoon pupils for our eyes. So first thing I'm going to do is let's just go ahead and hide our character's body so we can see everything very clearly. And then I'm going to select one of the eyes. And we need a material on this, so I'm going to select a Blinn material and apply that, and then just rename that. Let's call that eye color. Then we can certainly change the color of this, but we need to add in a pupil. So we're going to need some sort of texture. So I'm going to go into my Create Render Node. And I'm going to create a procedural texture. So instead of using a file I'm going to use what's called a ramp. Now, when I select that, it brings up this ramp editor. And you can actually see the ramp on the eye right now, you can see how this ramp goes from light to dark, in the back we have a dark color and we have a light color. But this isn't going to work. We need to change the type of ramp. So if we want we can change it to say a U ramp. And that actually maps it radially, but that's not what we want either. What we want is a circular ramp. When I do that, you can actually start to see this is actually looking a little bit like a pupil. So what we can do here is we can go into the ramp options and we can move the positions of the colors. So I have, by default, black and white, which is pretty much the colors I want. So we can basically create a pupil. And you can see how it's mapping onto the eye. But this isn't really what we want in terms of mapping, but we'll fix that a little bit later. I just want to get this texture in place. So the closer we move these together the harder the edge, so if I want to move this away you can see how it softens the edge. And then we can also change the color. So if we want we can select one of these and change it to whatever color we want. Or we can add in new colors. So if I click, say, somewhere in the middle here, it adds a new handle. And again I can change the color of that handle. So, for example, if I wanted blue, you can see I can create more of a blue eye with an actual sclera and pupil. But if we want to we can also get rid of these. All I have to do is hit this little X down here and that gets rid of it. So I'm just going to put this to something right about here. And that should be good. Once we have this you can see that, well, it's mapped to this eye but it's not mapped the right way. But we can change that using a texture map. So I'm just going to keep this selected, and I'm going to create UVs, and we're going to do a plainer mapping. When I do, you can see it creates a plainer map, snaps it to the outside edges. But I actually want the plainer map to be rotated the other direction. So I'm going to actually change my rotation in Y to zero. And that maps it. So you can see, I have something that looks pretty much like an eye. Now, one of the nice things about doing it this way is that you can actually change the size of the map to shrink and grow the pupil. So if you want to dilate the pupils you can do that. Or you can actually go into the attribute editor and change this by changing our Projection Width and Height. So let's say I wanted to put this say at 1.7, I can actually type in a number. And a good rigger can actually tap into these numbers and create a handle or a slider that allows you to dilate the pupils just by sizing the texture map. And that can be really fun. Now, another way to change the size of the pupil is to affect the ramp. So if I want to I can go into Eye Color, find my ramp, and all I have to do is just push this out or in, and that will again just change how big my pupil is. So once we have this one texture, we can apply it to the other eye. So all I have to do is select the eye, right click over it, and go Assign Existing Material, Eye Color. And there we go. Well, it's not there yet so I'm going to make sure I'm in Object mode, go Plainer Mapping, and then again what would we need to do? We need to rotate Y into zero. And then my Projection Width and Height, I set the other one to 1,7, so let's set both of these to 1.7 as well. So now I've got my eyeballs. Now, notice how the projection also comes in on the backside of the eye, but that's not going to affect anything because these eyes won't turn around that much. So now let's just go ahead and show Last Hidden, which is our character's body. And you can see that with the eyes he's starting to actually look like something. So we can actually take the eyes, he's a little cross-eyed right now, so let's go ahead and just rotate them out a little bit to get him looking straight forward. And there we go. So now we've got the eyes and all the brows done. So the last thing we need to do is texture the body, and we'll do that next.