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 h ow 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.

IPR
To give you access to interactive updating capabilities, you will set up an IPR rendering. An IPR rendering creates a special image file that stores not only the pixel information about an image but also data about the surface normals, materials and objects associated with each of these pixels. This information is then updated as you make changes to your scene’s shading.

Initial IPR rendering.

1. IPR set up
• From the Render View panel, click on the Render Globals button.

• Click on the Maya Software tab.

• From the Anti-aliasing Quality section, set Quality to Production Quality.

  For IPR, you can use the best settings if desired. Your initial IPR rendering will be slower but the interactive updates will still be fast.

• Close the Render Globals window.

2. IPR render
• From your Render View panel, select IPR > IPR Render > persp.

  Now what seems to be a regular rendering of the scene appears. Notice the message at the bottom of the Render View saying “Select a region to begin tuning.”

• Click+drag to select an area of the IPR rendering that will cover the entire orb. This is the area that will be updated as you make changes.