This lesson will start to create materials and lighting for the cells.
But before we do that let's make a few more adjustments to the animation.
We'll select all the clusters and let's add a little more time at the head of the animation because
currently we only have 20 seconds to kind of get oriented and see that there's one cell here when we
start to render this thing.
So let's give ourselves a little more time and I'll increase the time range to 300 and I'll just select
all of these and slide them down and time maybe to frame 40 of start frame by frame 40.
So we get two seconds almost to see this kind of single cell and the nucleus on the inside.
The other thing I want to do is select the cell membrane and just from a skillet down in Y and that
way it'll just not be a perfect sphere and look a little more cell like.
So when things separate it will kind of be flattened here.
So I think that will look a little bit better.
And the final render so that it's not entirely spherical.
OK.
Let's select the cell membrane and we can go to right click on the object and go to assigned new material.
And let's go to Arnold Shater and we'll choose a standard surface.
And if you don't have the Arnold render available you can go to Windows settings preferences and turn
it on in the plugin manager and then scroll down to him to a which is right here empty bundle and turn
that on if you're in a version of Maya before I think 20 17 or 20 into 2016 point five.
They only recently started to include Arnold and Maya.
So this is more for the most recent packages of Maya between 2017 2018 and beyond.
So now that we have this material selected let's add some lights.
Let's go to Arnold and where are the lights.
Skydome like so now let's preview what we've created by going to Arnold render preview and to initiate
the render preview we need it this play button.
So it's very wide.
And that's also because our Schrader's white and the light is white.
I'm going to first save this as materials before we go further.
And first let's turn off the Skydome light in the background so I will go down in the street editor
of the light and turn camera to zero.
So now we can just see the cells.
So let's go to the material by selecting on the membrane and the outliner and go over to the standard
surface shader we can call this membrane
and change the color to something like a blue so we can see a little better.
And what's school on here to transmission and turn the weight of that up a little bit.
Now you can see we can start to see the inside cell membrane and it's pretty distorted right now and
we can adjust that by using the incidence of refraction right here.
So 1.5 to I believe is this is like a mathematical thing you can look up on Google and centers of fractions
for certain materials and I'm pretty sure 1.5 2 is glass.
So I mean actually command and middle click in this area or we can just use the slider so we can use
the slider here and we can see the distortion of the inside starts to go away.
So that's pretty interesting.
And we can also see this before the cells divide we can see this update especially It might be helpful
when the cells are actually dividing to see how this connection is made here.
So we can see it's also fairly rough here and we're going to increase the amount of the the size of
the triangles down so that there will be more of them when we do the final render.
But for now to speed things up or keep that kind of low.
So let's go to the specular And let's just increase the roughness of the specular a little bit.
That way it'll kind of diffuse this out and the transmission a little bit
and we can also add extra roughness extra roughness and the transmission attribute.
So now it looks like there is actually a material this is being transmitted through the light and we
might want to also turn on the opacity.
So if we get on here to geometry of the material and we turn down opacity nothing happens.
So there's one little trick in Arnold that you have to do to allow opacity.
So let's close this right now so you can see this and we'll go over to the shape of this poly surface
and we'll go down to Arnold.
Scroll down to opaque and see that it's checked and we want to check this off for this material to be
transparent.
We need that off.
So let's turn back on the Arnold interview and now you can see it is somewhat transparent.
We can look at the alpha channel and see that it is actually going through the Slayer.
So let's go back in to the material and make some more adjustments
so we can turn the of Haci all the way off.
Pretty much if we wanted to but I like to keep it somewhat opaque and we can also adjust this after
we have materials on the nucleus.
So let's add material to the nucleus or close this select the nucleus and right click in here and go
to right click in here and go to assign the material and we'll add a another a standard surface and
that lets make it inside of this red so we can see it and go back to the Arnel render preview so we
can see what we're doing in at play.
And now you can see the inside of the nucleus here.
So it's looking pretty cool.
So now let's push this effect much further.
Let's create a little more disruption because these cells are very smooth all the way around.
And that's something you may want and that's fine.
But for me I would like to see a little more roughness here.
And so we have a little different kind of surfaces to see specular highlights.
So I want to close this for now I'm going to select the membrane and go to form texture to form and
I'll go over to naturae Ed. and the texture where it's looking for something to adjust.
I'll add a fractal quick check checker box over here to the right and go to fractal.
You can see it makes it really crazy right now.
And we can adjust those settings.
We can go to click this little in and now button to get back to the texture to form or tab.
Now we can of course drop the strength but the main thing we want to change is the direction.
Right now it looks like it's kind of up and down which is the handle of the texture to former.
So we can change that direction but I would rather it be the faces the normals of the face so it should
be shooting out in all directions kind of in this radial fashion.
So for direction we should use normal.
So now you can see it's all splayed out in every direction but it's kind of crazy.
So let's drop the strength a little bit.
So we still have that little bit of roughness but it's not too crazy.
But one issue we're running into is the fact that the subdivisions aren't great enough to smooth everything
out so we can see that we have these little pointy areas of the mesh and if we go into Arnold render
view we'll see the same thing.
So we can see it's very choppy but already it's added a lot more detail a lot more interest I think
to the cell membranes but let's get rid of these sharp edges for now.
So with the mesh selected we will go down to the Poly surface shape of this and under subdivision we
want to turn on the type of cat Clark you know what this says is that render time it will smooth out
and subdivide the surface another time so we can see it's already smoothed out all those very sharp
edges and everything's looking a little more bumpy instead of sharp.
So it's pretty cool.
And the next thing we can do is continue to affect the Shater.
So let's go back into the Shater for the cell membrane
and let's increase the transmission.
And as we increase the transmission you can see we're losing some of the color.
So under color let's add this blue color back in and then just reduce the saturation a little bit.
So it's not too crazy.
I just want to make sure we're keeping this color as we're increasing the transmission and to reduce
the kind of distortion of this we can lower the instance or refraction a little more so now we can kind
of see the interior of the cell and the cell nucleus.
But we still maintain these kind of rougher outer edges.
So it's looking pretty good.
We can also reduce this texture to form or looks like it's maybe where we would have like a nice smooth
parting of the cells.
It's looking a little rough like we're not getting that kind of nice connection here so let's go into
the texture to former again and we just need to drop this offset down so that we can actually see that
kind of division taking place.
So we can scroll back and make sure that's looking the way we want it to look throughout the whole animation.
So that seems to be working.
Let's jump back into the material.
And I don't think we necessarily need the opacity here for this.
I think we're going to get enough out of the transmissions so school on here to geometry and increase
the capacity back.
So it's a little denser kind of a cell membrane here.
I think what we need is a little more specular to see the kind of edges of these cells.
So we've had we have specular all the way up and we could reduce the roughness but it's not really going
to get us more specular.
There's one more option and the Arnold stand or Shater and that is the coat and that's essentially like
the top coat of a car.
So you have the paint and then you have a top coat on top of that.
So if we increase the weight and the weight of this you'll be able to see that we're getting a lot more
white highlights and the specular areas and that's making it look a little more shiny and sell like
to me.
So that's pretty cool.
And I think we could probably reduce that texture to a or a little bit.
And before we do that let's just increase the cat Clark of this mesh.
We had it only set to 1.
So we have a little bit more room to increase that render time so we can go back to the surface shape
down to subdivision and we can increase that aeration to and we can watch it update and smooth everything
out that much more.
So the red nucleus is kind of dull right now.
So let's go into the material of the nucleus is and if we can scroll over and the read editor you get
to the
standard surface of the nucleus and let's turn on a mission and a mission is essentially kind of creating
it as a light.
So it read and we turn up the weight.
And you can see it's getting much much brighter as we turn up the weight.
So now we're kind of maintaining that saturation while it's still inside of the cell.
So that's pretty cool.
I think the one thing that's bugging me still is I think the texture to form is a little rough on the
cell membrane so we can go back to the text or the former and just decrease the strength a little bit
more.
So I just want to break up this silhouette.
I just don't want it to be a perfect kind of edge all the way around.
So that's looking a lot better and I think we can do the same thing on the nucleus is.
So it's sort of textured or former to those like the nucleus go to the form texture.
And over here let's make sure we choose normal and map in an other fractal.
So it's Baz's out and that's OK.
We can just reduce the strength and decrease they offset a little bit and just keep dialing this down
until we get it to be the size we want we can also see it in the viewport over here kind of split the
screen a little bit struck the strength way down and you turn up the offset to keep the nucleus kind
of big.
And it looks like we're doing a pretty good job of kind of getting this irregular silhouette to the
nucleus so it's not perfectly round as well.
The other thing we can do of course is to turn on the cat Clark for the nucleus.
So let's go over to the shape again and go down a subdivision and turn on a cat Clark and see it'll
smooth out those sharp edges again.
So it's looking a lot better and a lot more organic.
So I'm liking where this is that the only thing I'm thinking right now is it might be nice to see the
texture to formers animate because if you look in the viewport here you can see that you know we moved
all animation down to frame 40 and the nucleus is there all moving around from the expression we created
but the cell membrane itself is completely static.
And one way we can adjust that is by animating the fractal of the cell membrane.
So let's go to the texture the former here of that one and go into the texture and the fractal and the
fractal settings you can see down here there is actually an animated button we can turn that on and
we can just say in the time attribute we can just go equals time maybe we can say times 2.
And so we're writing an expression right inside the Sashka when we hit enter it'll create the expression.
So we're basically just saying this value should always change as the Times played times too.
So it should be twice as fast.
And so if we play back we can see it's probably way too much.
So let's go into the expression what's right click on this and say EDID expression and we get up this
we get this familiar window and let's say POINT FIVE TIMES point five so we'll be half as much as the
time it is played.
So will it all be to play back.
I mean see it's still pretty busy so I'll skip out of that and we can just keep adjusting this point
one and at it and we can play back again so that what that actually looks pretty good it's kind of giving
it a little bit of noise to a cell membrane.
So it's kind of undulating with the texture the former I might go down just a little bit more point
in 0 8 and see if that's even better.
So I'm actually liking that quite a bit and I think that adds quite a lot to the animation and these
kind of moments where it's completely still
I think that looks great.
So now that we have this done let's close the expression editor and let's get into rendering.
So I'll see in the next lesson.
Thanks for watching.