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In this tutorial we will create a light weight maya shader that can be used to get that electron microscope look. The shader will work in Maya software render and in Mental ray and is lighting and shadow independent so you won’t have to worry about raytracing, light rigs, or having to use a certained type surface.

First open up a new scene in Maya.

Next, Open up the render settings by Window> Rendering Editors> Render Settings and switch to Software Render and uncheck Enable default light like in the image below.

As far as the model goes, create a rather dense polygon sphere with the below settings.

At this point I should mention this shader does not look great on flat or squared of corners. On the other hand the more organic and rounded a model is the better it will look. So use something like Maya’s Sculpt Geomtry Tool to add defromations to the sphere like in the image below.

With the modeling done open up Hypershade (Window> Rendering Editors> Hypershade).

In the Hypershade menu create a new Lambert material (Create> Materials> Lambert) and attach the material to the deformed sphere.

Open up the material in the attribute editor by double clicking on it in the hypershade. Select the ambient channel and attach a ramp to it.

Next, select and graph the material so the it can be edited in the Hypershade work area. (right click on material and select Graph Network).

Now for the nuts and bolts. Looking at references of Electron microscope images the edges of objects have a some what glowing effect. We will use the extremely useful Sampler Info Node to copy this effect.

In the Hypershade go to Create> General Utilities> Sampler Info Node. Select the node and middle mouse drag over the ramp. On the connection pop up select Other from the list.

In the connection editor select facing ratio on the left and v coordiante on the right.

Doing a render now should have the same results as the below image. The facing ratio combined with ramp allows the shader to have complete control of its edges.

Now that we have control over the edges only the ramp needs to be adjusted. Double click the ramp in the work area to see its attributes. Use the images below for the ramps colors and the final ramp result.

That should finish up the shader and a render should result in something like the below image.

Thank you for Reading……