Here are Maya’s Basic Materials.

1.  Create a surface to apply the material
   • – Click on SURFACES TAB and click on the NURBs sphere.
   • – [ PRESS 5 ] to apply shade mode.
   • – If I select the material, I can apply a material. By default it has a lambert shader applied. Lambert  is a flat shader.
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2. Choosing and Applying a Shader
   • – Select your surface, go to RENDERING || Lights/Shading > [CHOOSE]
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   • Or…
   • Select the RENDERING TAB and choose from the list of materials
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3. Assign a Blinn Material to the Sphere Thru the Menu.
   • – Go to RENDERING || Lights/Shading > Assign Favorite Material > Blinn
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   • – Material applies a “Specular” highlight on the surface.
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4. Adjust the Blinn Attributes
   • – Select the surface.
   • – Open your Attribute Editor and click on the farthest tab to the right, which should be your material, the blinn tab.
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   • – You can modify, color, transparency, ambient color, etc.
   • – The Material Sample in the Attribute Editor will display the changes that you make to the attributes.
   • – Sometimes you’ll see the changes in the viewport. If not you’ll have to either render the scene or change the render settings to Viewport 2.0.
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   • Specular Shading Attribute:
   • – Controls the way you see highlights on the surface.
   • Eccentricity: How broad or small the spot highlight is on the surface.
   • Specular Rolloff: Is the spot fading off or is it a sharp edge.
5. Name your Material and add it to another surface.
   • – Select your original surface and rename the material in the attribute editor.
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   • – Create another surface.
   • – Select your new surface and RIGHT + CLICK > Assign Existing Material > [SELECT YOUR NAMED MATERIAL]
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