Modelling & Rigging a Cartoon Parrot in Maya: Part 7

1. 3D Painting Bald Map for Fur

Step 1

Open the file in Maya which was saved in the last part of the tutorial. 

Step 2

With the parrot's body selected, secondary-click on the mesh and go to Assign Favorite Material > Lambert.

Step 3

With the body mesh selected, go to Show > Isolate Select and check on View Selected option to isolate the selected mesh.

Step 4

Change the Maya mode into rendering mode. Click on the mode arrow button and select Rendering option in the drop down list. 

Step 5

With the parrot mesh selected, go to Texturing > 3D Paint Tool and click on the option box.

Step 6

You can see the 3D Paint Tool settings attributes at the right side of the screen.  You will observe the paint brush stroke in cross mark. Now, you have to assign the texture map node for enabling 3D paint brush on the selected parrot mesh.

Step 7

Go down in the attributes panel and choose Attributes to paint as Incandescence. Click on Assign/Edit Texture button to assign the incandescence map.

Step 8

It opens the Assign/Edit File Texture window. Keep Size X and Size Y values as 2048 and then click on Assign/Edit Texture button.

Step 9

In the 3D Paint Tool settings panel, click on Flood Paint button inside the Flood panel.

Step 10

You can see the white color has been applied on the selected parrot body mesh. 

Step 11

To paint the black color on the parrot body mesh, select Artisan brush profile. Turn on Reflection and Reflection Axis X options inside the Stroke panel.

Step 12

Paint those areas with black color where you don't want the fur; like beak and eyes.

Step 13

You should paint the beak and eyes parts like this.

Step 14

After painting, save it as a map by clicking on Save Texture button inside the File Textures panel.

Step 15

Whenever you save a texture map, you can see the default path of saving location at the lower screen of Maya. Select this location path and press Ctrl-C to copy. Open Photoshop and press Ctrl-V button to paste address path in the open document’s address bar. 

Step 16

This opens the saved texture map in Photoshop.    

Step 17

Save the texture map file as Bald Map.jpg.

2. Applying Material

Step 1

With the parrot body mesh selected, do right click and go to Assign Favorite Material > Lambert in the fly out menu.

Step 2

Select Rendering mode to apply the fur on the parrot body mesh.  

Step 3

Even after changing the application in rendering mode, you might not see the fur menu on the main menu bar. In such case, you need to load the fur plug-in.

3. Enabling Fur Plug-in

Step 1

Go to Window > Settings/Preferences > Plug-in Manager to open the plug-in manager.

Step 2

In the plug-in manager window, turn on Loaded and Auto Load check boxes of Fur.mll. Click on Close button to close the window.

4. Applying Fur

Step 1

With the parrot body mesh selected, go to Fur > Attach Fur Description > New.

Step 2

After applying fur, you can see the result in the viewport. 

Step 3

Render a test frame. There are a lot of settings yet to tweak before you could see the fur properly.  

5. Setting up Fur Attributes

Step 1

With any of the fur strands selected in the viewport, press Ctrl-A button to open the fur attributes panel. Select FurDescription1 tab.

Step 2

Scroll down the slider and find Density and Global Scale. Keep their values as 20000 and 0.500 respectively.  

Step 3

Render a test frame. This time you will find the fur with better density. But the beak and eyes parts are also covered with fur, which you should take care of. 

6. Applying Bald Map

Step 1

In the FurDescription1 attributes, secondary-click on Baldness property and select Create New Texture option in the fly out menu. 

Step 2

It opens the Create Render Node window. Click on File node.

Step 3

In the File attributes, click on Image Name folder icon.

Step 4

Select the Bald Map.jpg file and click on Open button.

Step 5

After applying the bald map, click on Bake button to bake the texture.

Step 6

After baking the bald map, you can see the fur distribution on the parrot mesh. This time eyes and beak areas are unaffected. 

Conclusion

In this part of the tutorial, I showed you how to do 3D painting and create Bald map for applying fur on the distinguished parts of the parrot body mesh. In the next part of the tutorial, I will show you how to create Color maps for the fur and then apply it to the entire parrot body mesh.