yes go with exturing the circle down the curve, then take a look at some of the preset textures in Maya some of these may suit your needs you could even go about and add a layered texture node which you can then plug multiple textures in to get a layered effect on your pipe, so for example you could add a noise texture for a general colour, then go and add a corrorsion texture for a rust effect, then plug these both into the layered texture and plug that into your material, if you want lighting all the way down your pipe when animating, simply set up a lighting rig with is perented to the camera so for example you could have the light just sitting behind the camera pointing out and wherever the camera will go the light will follow
Pipe_A.jpg is what it needs to look like. Pipe_B.jpg is my model so far.
IÕve used the Maya preset grid texture to create the lines. One of the problems I'm having is the closer you get to the corners/curves of the pipe, the lines seem to get closer together. Then on the longer/straighter parts of the Pipe they get further apart. Is there a way to keep the lines even throughout the hole pipe? I'm guessing but I think its because of the geometry of the Pipe itself. There are more isoparms closer to the corners then the straight-aways. So in turn the UV mapping of the texture is replicating this? Does this make sense? If so should I re-build the Pipe a different way.
ok theres another way to do this if you have access to Maya 7 use the new toon outline feature, let me know if you have 7 then I can go into the options for the correct look
Yes I'm running Maya 7. Your thinking of using the new Toon shading for this hey?
Very Cool, I have never used it before still pretty new to Maya. IÕve heard its great..
can you explain how to use it in this scenario?
They might want to animate the panels so the brightness of them is changing down the Pipe. So the rows of panels light up and darken giving the illusion that the light is traveling down the Pipe.
Not sure if you can animate Toon shading as well. But I'm probably getting ahead of myself. I was thinking at first that I would have to create an animated
texture map.
ok for the lines on the tube first of all, get your tube with the amount of divisions for th amount of panels you want around and running down the pipe then goto your toon panel and assign a new outline to the model, take this and turn down the min crease to 0 and turn Hard Edges Only to OFF this will then give you a clear outline of your wireframe, you an also turn down the Max crease Value to 0 to get thick lines
then convert your paint strokes to polygons and delete history and you have a nice look like in the images