Dirtying Textures

[Overwrought]

How do I "dirty up" a texture in Maya?

[Professor Watkins]

The easiest way would be to add some dirt to your color texture map in photoshop. Probably using the Render>Clouds on a new layer, you could create a general layer of grime.

For specifically getting corners dirty; this is a bit more complicated. Let me do some research and get back with you on some methods.

[Professor Watkins]

The Beauty of Diffuse

Here's a brief example of how to dirty things up within Maya.

As with C4D, Maya has a Diffuse channel that works great for this sort of thing. Think of your Diffuse nodes as Dirt nodes.

Let's look at the sample file: It's a simple scene with a simple shader (Normal) that uses the Checkerboard as the Color node.



Too clean and too stale.

Select the shader in the Hypershade, and in the Attributes editor you'll see the nifty Diffuse channel.



Click on the button at the far right to tell it you wish to import a texture map. At the Create Render Node window, you can choose Fractal, Noise, or if you've created a custom Texture map: File.



Now, your Hypershade should look something like this:


Notice that the surface is immediately dirty. You can change the size of the dirt with the place2DTexture node.

[Professor Watkins]

Dirty textures cont'd

The result of just using the default fractal shade is shown here:



Getting closer; but that grime is a bit too intense.

To ease up on the dirt, select the fractal node (the file node) in the Hypershade. In your Attributes window, you will see the image below that lets you reduce the contrast, size and other characteristics. Adjust to taste.



The results of the settings shown above are rendered here:



Remember that this is a general coating of the surface; but can help immediately get your shaders so that they don't look quite so stale and "computery"

Hope that helps.

[Overwrought]

THX!

[Overwrought]

So how do i layer textures? Ill start a new thread.