Texturing Tips

Texture adds richness and depth to scenes and characters. While not every project uses textures, knowing how to add and work with them will make you a more versatile digital artist.

The three most important qualities of good textures:

1- Define the material - Is it denim? wood? metal? a rusted door? an old dirty rag?

2- Define maunfacturing - Emblems, logos, stiching, bolts, seams, grain, panels

3- Define age - Wear and tear, dirt, scratches, nicks, paint chips, rust, smudges

There are many ways to add texture to objects in maya. Below is a summary of the various methods of doing so. These methods can often be combined; for example, you could use a procedural shader to define the visibility of image-based textures in a scene.

The two main categories that all of these techniques all into are:

Procedural - made inside of maya using procedural shading nodes. Ex: Ramp, Noise, Stucco, Volume Fractal. Can be 2d or 3d.

Authored - made inside/outside of maya using some type of external input. Ex: Photoshop painting using wacom tablet, digital camera, scanned drawing, movie sequence.

Authored textures can be made in a number of ways, such as....

Downloaded - visit a texture archive (see here and here) and grab some images. Grab several variations and you can tweak/blend them in Photoshop.

Digital camera - make your own textures by photographing your own. Pictures taken from a top-down/front-on view, with the sample flat under even lighting, will work best.

Painted/Drawn in Photoshop and Illustrator - go for it! Wheee!

Painting in Maya using 3d Paint tool - Maya has a 3d paint tool that allows painting on objects in real time. The resulting image can then be saved and exported to Photoshop for additional cleanup and fixes.

Painted in Zbrush or Mudbox, detail exported back to Maya - Zbrush and Mudbox offer ways of sculpting high level detail into a model. The detail can be exported as an image map that Maya can read and apply to the original model. When the model is rendered, the high level detail will be included.


Ideal authored texture size is 512x512, 1024 x 1024, or 2048 x 2048.