procedural problem

# 1 23-09-2005 , 12:14 AM

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Greetings,

I am hoping someone could give me a "walk" through of what steps would be necessary to create a globe similar to the one in the attached picture.

I am hoping for my end result to be an etched glass globe that I can light from within.

For practice I have created several globes with different materials.

I have no idea how to get the world map, or the longitudinal or latitude lines "etched"

Is there some automatic process?

I've used a program called Paint Shop Pro is has some built in effects for textures like leather, emboss etc.

Is there some equivalent in Maya?

Where can I find, or what can I use to take a 2d drawing of a map and change it so that it looks correct on a sphere?

Can I use PSP and Spherize something ... does that translate into the proper type of image for placing it on a sphere in Maya?

If I am ultimately trying to get the effect of an etched glass globe is using an image even appropriate? Not knowing the answer, I would think that the image would prevent the glass see through effect.

Any recommendations would be most appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
wizzie

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# 2 23-09-2005 , 08:55 AM

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I have no idea how to get the world map, or the longitudinal or latitude lines "etched"

Originally Posted by

Bump Mapping or Displacement will do it.

The thing you need to look at is uv mapping. Basically you "unwrap" the spehere into a 2d layout (a globe is a good example think of a flat map on a wall). You then apply the map to your geometry through a shader and the map will be placed on the sphere. Look through the manual for some basic mapping tips.

it's a little hard to get your head around at first but once you do it's easy.

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# 3 24-09-2005 , 03:36 AM

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thanks

Hi,
Thanks for your reply.

I am very new to working with Maya, so most of what you said i "sort" of understand conceptually, I just have no idea how to applly it in Maya.

I have made some small progress though. After fiddling with it for over 11 hours I managed to put a texture on it. It rendered and it looked like crap.

See, what I need to understand is the order of things.

like:
step 1 create a sphere (im using polygon .. should it be nurbs?)
step 2 assign a new material (im using blinn with a .png file for the texture)
step 3 right click and select face
step 4 select Polygon UVs->Spherical Mapping
step 5 change the Horizontal Sweep to 360
step 6 change the Vertical Sweep to 180
.... that's about as far as I get
When I render it it lookls like crap. Nothing like a glass globe
So, I hunt and I peck and I hunt and I peck and on and on and I don't find a thing that tells me how to make this polygon sphere look like glass.
Once I apply the texture the tranparency slider under the Common Material Attributes does not do anything it won't even move

One thing that in my early experience about Maya is that the user interface is not that intuitive nor is it easy to get around.
I have never figured out, for example how to unset something without doing an undo. All of the attributes that I see with the checker board square from what I can tell are those that are either unset or default settings. Once I set something it changes from a checkerboard to a square with an arrow pointing to the right (screen shot included) How the heck to do un do that. Suppose I have added several more polygons and some other things and decide I want to do something different with a setting for the color of a polygon in a material.

The only way I know to 'undo' a setting is to undo ALL the way back to where it was set, or delete the object polygon and start over.

Why isn't there a clear or reset right menu click?

And why is there no dropdown list of the objects you have in the scene? It would be nice if I wanted to select an object that was inside another object using a dropdown list instead of having to navgiate through that 'graphical' navigation of that hypergraph.

I see the need for the hypergraph for some find detail work, but at an object level all i want to do is select something a dropdown box is way more efficient.

Any way I digress from my original subject.

Creating a glass globe in what is considered the one of the premier modeling programs should be a lot easier than the way it is currently done.

I performed something similar in about 15 minutes in an On Line game called Second Life. I created a sphere, selected the material glass, applied my .tga texture (SL does not do .pngs) set the transparancy in real time to what I liked and created a light that shines on the inside. Now there's no fancy ray tracing or photons, but the procedure for creating the components required to make the object was simple.

I don't have a "Maya" vocabulary yet. Creating a glass globe is done with what? A shader? 2D Texture, 3D Texture, A DGS Material? What?

Whew!

Thanks,
wizzie

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procedural problem

thanks

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