Need some help with shaders?

# 1 05-04-2011 , 05:02 PM

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Join Date: Apr 2011

Posts: 4

Hello,

I have a mountain I made using soft modification tool and then triangulating the geometry and applying a Normals->Harden Edges and I am trying to apply solid color shaders to specific parts (brown for my mountain, white for snow, green for my grass) so I created two lambert hypershader thingys (as seen in my attachment) and I am trying to apply the green to the grass faces, and the brown to the other faces but I can't figure out how to do it.

My steps are.
I lasso select all the faces for the mountain then try and drag the lambert brown texture onto them and it doesn't work.

My errors (I think), I went Color->Apply Color before trying this which turned them from a see through box into a gray box with lighting from my light source, but now I can't apply any kind of a shader or anything?

Any help!?

Thanks!

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# 2 05-04-2011 , 06:08 PM

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Join Date: Dec 2006

Location: South FL

Posts: 3,522

The "Color>Apply Color" operation is for hardware rendering, it will show up in the viewport or if you use the hardware renderer but not with any software renderer. Go back to "Apply Color" and choose the "remove color" option this time and it should be back to normal.

Honestly, instead of trying to apply separate shaders to faces (which will result in razor sharp transitions between colors) It would be better if you used the 3D paint tool so you can paint where snow, grass, dirt is supposed to be then save that out to paint over in Photoshop, or maybe you'll get it as detailed as you want right inside Maya.

1.Assign a new shader to the model, lambert if you don't want to deal with hardware highlights.

2. Assign a file texture node to the color slot of the shader and leave the file path blank.

3. Select the model and go to the "Rendering" menu set. And under the "Texturing" menu choose the 3D paint tool>options.

4. In the option box, under "File Textures" press the "Assign/Edit Textures" button and set the resolution and file format for the texture, hit "Assign/Edit Textures".

5. Paint away and "Save Textures".

- Genny
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# 3 05-04-2011 , 06:11 PM

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Join Date: Apr 2011

Posts: 4

Thanks for your suggestion, however I am trying to duplicate https://cias.rit.edu/~jrs9486/assets/images/biome.jpg that style which is why I want razor hard edge transitions between the colors.

My apologies I should have included this in the original post.

I'm still trying to figure out why I can't assign a selection of faces a particular shader and the rest another shader. If I click on the brown lambert shader and then select all my faces it turns them brown but when I click elsewhere to unselect them it turns them back green. Perhaps I need to remove the green and maybe apply it to specific faces?

Last edited by dubcanada; 05-04-2011 at 06:13 PM.

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# 4 05-04-2011 , 06:48 PM

The Nurb Herd
Join Date: Oct 2007

Location: London

Posts: 2,381

hey, thats really nice.

so did you select the faces then right click and go to assign existing shader?

i just tried it and it works for me. I triangulated the same way you did and i think the problem you might find is that it looks too even. You may find that you need to add more model detail to get a better look. (if this is a test ignore me.)

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# 5 05-04-2011 , 07:13 PM

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Join Date: Apr 2011

Posts: 4

I managed to figure it out, I applied the green to everything and it overlayed the brown for some reason so I just deleted everything and did it again and it worked perfectly.

How would you suggest I create the mountains? I'm not sure if the soft mod tool does a good enough job.

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