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. We pick up from where we left off at our last excerpt.

5. IPR and the Attribute Editor
• Open the Attribute Editor.

• Click on an object in the IPR image and see the Attribute Editor update to show its shader.

6. Refresh the IPR image
When you have models outside the IPR region, you can refresh the entire image without losing your selected region.

Dropping a material in PR.

• To refresh the entire image, click on the Refresh the IPR Image button.

The entire image gets redrawn and your original region is maintained.

7. IPR lighting
You can also use the IPR window to explore different lighting scenarios. By default when you don’t have any lights in your scene, the IPR creates a directional light for you. Changing the light direction will cause the IPR to redraw accordingly.
• Using the Outliner, select the defaultLight node.

• In the Perspective view, rotate the light to see the IPR update with the new lighting.