I'm a Maya neophyte and would love some help with shading and/or projection. My problem is this. I am creating a scene with a satellite orbiting earth, to which I have applied a chrome shader. I want a 2D image of an astronaut to sail across the satellite, so that it looks like a reflection moving across the metallic surface. How do I apply this projection over the top of the chrome shader and how do I animate it so that it appears at a particular frame and then moves across the satellite and eventually disappears at a particular frame? Have searched to no avail. Sorry if this is just too simple for words...
Hey there. So if i get it right you want the astronaut to reflect but not to be visible. Maybe that can be done by using layered animated shaders, but that would be ridiculously tough(well at least to me). The way i would do it is create a simple 2d astronaut and make him fly around the satellite and then simply turn of primary visibility, but leave cast shadows and visible in reflections on. Thats it.
That sounds like a good way to do it. Only trouble is I can't seem to import my 2D file into Maya. I've tried it as a PSD and an AI, but all I get is a group with a tranform node and no object. As I said, I'm a neophyte! What am I doing wrong?
make a plane and apply a texture to it. (image = nothing in 3d without something to slap it on, just like a paper is the medium on which images are usually printed in real world, theres no such things as just images all hard copy photographic images are on a medium of some kind)