All images from Learning Maya 7 | Foundation by Marc-André Guindon and Cathy McGinnis. Reprinted with permission.

In this lesson, you will set up materials and textures for the orb. You will explore the makeup of a typical shading network, including its material node and any texture maps.

This lesson will make extensive use of the Interactive Photorealistic Renderer (IPR) found in Maya. This tool allows you to create a rendering of the scene that can then be used to interactively update changes to the scene’s lighting and texturing. You will see how fast and intuitive it is to texture in Maya using IPR.

In this lesson, you will learn how to render a region; how to display snapshots; how to open and save your rendered images; how to display an image’s alpha channel; how to set up the IPR; how to make connections in the Hypershade; how to enable High Quality Rendering in a viewport.

Render View Features
You are now ready to test render the orb. In this section, you will experiment with the Render View features, such as snapshots, image storage and region rendering. You can continue with the file you were using previously, or open 11-texturedOrb.ma.

1. Panel set up
• In the Perspective view, select Panels > Saved Layouts > Hypershade/Render/Persp.

• RMB+click in the Render View and select Render > Render > Persp.

2. Keep and remove image
When test rendering a scene, it is good to be able to keep previously rendered images for comparison with the changes you implement.
• To keep the current render for reference, select File > Keep Image in Render View or click the Keep Image button.

Notice a slider bar appears at the bottom of the Render View.

• In the Hypershade, MMB-drag the animTxtLambert shader into the Work Area and graph its connections.

The aniTxt shading group.

• MMB+drag the animTxtFile over the animTxtLambert material.

• Choose Incandescence from the context menu to map the file in the incandescence of the material.

This will reuse that same texture file but for incandescence. Incandescence will give the illusion that the numbers of the texture are glowing.

• In the Render View, render the model again.

• Once the rendering is done, scroll the image bar at the bottom of the Render View to compare the previous render results.

• Scroll the image bar to the right (the older image), and select File > Remove Image from Render View or click the Remove Image button.

This will remove the currently displayed image stored earlier.