Textures
Most of the texturing process was smooth but it didn’t come without its difficulties. For the most part, I only had to choose textures I liked from the internet, but others required a little more fine-tunning.
First of all the trees. For some reason Maya wasn’t recognising the leaf texture, making the branches look like flat images. But this problem was quickly solved when Kelvin told me that I needed a transparency shader. I just had to use photoshop and it finally worked!
Secondly, had to find a way to create a type of soil that would look as if it were from another planet. Once again, YouTube tutorials were vital sources of information to solve this. I found out that I could blend two images and multiply the number of times they are repeated. This was extremely useful and it gave the terrain a unique and exotic look.
Also, I had to switch from a skydome to a sphere due to some complications with lighting (I will mention it below). But this did not compromise anything.
Finally, the biggest problem I had with the textures was with the base for the temple. I originally wanted it to be made out of stone but since I did not understand how to do UV mapping, I had to find a quicker solution and opt for wood, since it looks good even if it’s stripy. I really tried to understand UV mapping but there was a lot to unravel and I only have a couple of days left, so I think it was a pretty successful alternative.
Lights
As for the lights, there is not much to say. I wanted to have a few panels illuminating the path where there were no trees, in order to shift the focus towards the temple and the cave, as well as the paths that led to them. I chose light pink for the lighting to make it more unnatural and somewhat cosmic. I also added some pink ambient lights near the planets to create a similar effect. And finally, I added one directional light to brighten up the space.
I only had one issue throughout this process. When I rendered it with Maya Hardware 2.0, the panels would literally show up uninvited. But I found out how to solve this after being here for almost one hour. I had enabled the lights to show on the Maya 2.0 engine because I wanted the skydome to show the image. I just had to replace it with a sphere, disable the lights on the render settings, and done.