Differences in Materials

LightWave's Surface Editor is called Hypershade in Maya. Hypershade, which works in a much looser way than the Surface Editor, uses floating swatches that are wired together to create materials. For example, a procedural checkered texture can be wired to a material's color input, thus overriding the solid-colored swatch with a checkered texture.

In Maya, materials are edited at their root in the Attribute Editor, where the familiar variables appear: Diffuse, Color, Specularity, and so forth. In Maya, you have more flexibility in wiring any texture to the input of any other texture. For example, in a procedural checkered texture, you could replace each of the two solid colors that normally fill the checkered squares with a unique texture, such as marble. Maya does not have the blending modes that are part of composing textures in LightWave, but you can achieve the same effect with Maya's Layered Texture option for a texture. Maya's procedural textures don't normally leave part of the texture transparent to the underlying texture. In Maya, a texture normally overrides the value it's assigned to. For example, if you assign a checkered material in LightWave, the black squares show through to the underlying texture or the original color assignment. In Maya, the checkered material would completely cover the previous color assignment. If you want underlying colors or textures to show through, use Maya's Layered Texture option.

Both the Attribute Editor for materials and Hypershade use only spheres to preview a material as it's composed. However, in Hypershade, you can zoom and pan the spherical swatches as needed to get larger, higher-resolution feedback on your material edits.

LightWave's method of having a single material type with a variety of post shaders, such as cartoon Super CEL and Thin Film, is completely alien to Maya. In Maya, a material is one of several flavors at its root: Blinn, Lambert, Phong, and so forth. For effects such as a cel-shader look, a special material type called Shading Map is offered. Also, materials in Maya are created and assigned as needed instead of being dictated by scene objects, as in LightWave. A simple Lambert material type is automatically assigned to any newly created object, but usually, animators create a new material and assign it to the object and any other objects in the scene consisting of the same material. You can even create materials in a scene devoid of objects.

Mapping: NURBS objects in Maya have inherent mapping that determines how texture maps are placed. Polygons offer UV mapping that's similar to LightWave's process, but in Maya, you can interactively size a mapping frame to place the texture where you want it. Further, Maya offers an Automatic Mapping option that enables you to unwrap and stitch together an object's UV mapping to avoid smearing and "singularities," in which the texture seems to pinch together.