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# 5 20-12-2010 , 07:26 PM
Nilla's Avatar
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Join Date: Jun 2009
Location: Prague
Posts: 827
Not to discourage you, but doing what you want is quite difficult. For getting realistic damaged metal like that you'll need both a texture and a material that that works, you'll also need nice lighting for your material to work the way it should.

You can do it in one out of two ways, you can either as mentioned lay out UV's for the robot by laying them out flat by hand in Maya's UV texture editor or you can use a plug-in. Either way models should always have UV's. When you've done this you can find a metallic texture at one of the large texture sites like CG textures and connect it in as a color map to a material. You would also need to make a bump map to make it realistic. These types of textures are bitmaps and in Maya if you look in your Hypershade you also have procedural textures, if you use 3d procedural noise textures they work independently of UV's and connecting them together in the right way you can build up things like scratches and imperfections on metals but this is quite tricky to get right.

Fot the materials you can use a blinn for metals, but mental ray materials give better results in general. To get an idea of how metallic materials are made you can look at the metallic paint and car paint materials. Metallic surfaces depend on reflections so for this reason you can't render in isolation but you'll need to create an environment around your model, this can be done by an environment sphere, using image based lighting or mapped reflections.

So these would be the things you'd want to look at. But start by laying out the UV's and then go from there.

Nilla