Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Nodes and Connections - Iridescence

I was working on a friend's model of a mosquito the other day and I found out how to make a pretty good fake of iridescence for insect eyes!

In maya open the hypershade. Create a mia_material_x(_passes are preferred), blinn, or other kind of material with reflection color. Then create a ramp, found in the 2D Maya textures. Then under Maya Utilities, still in the hypershade, create a Sampler Info node.

Now it's time to hook everything up! Pay attention, though it's quite simple!

Middle mouse drag the sampler info onto the ramp and your connection editor will pop up. On the left click facing ratio and on the right expand UVCoord(it will be grayed out), then select the vCoord and hit close. This hooks up the ramp to the cameras, so that whenever you render the ramp faces the camera.

Next, MM drag the ramp onto your material and again the connection editor will pop up. Select outColor on the left and reflColor on the right, then hit close!

Render your scene with the material applied to the geometry, and voila! You have a pretty neat looking iridescence!

Enjoy!

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