a morning of rendering introduction

I was rudely awakened by the dustman this morning at 7:30, but decided to capitalize on this by running downstairs and jumping on to some pre-breakfast Maya training.

I learned a lot of the basics of render nodes, and how to connect them, most of which is very dull and hard to sum up in a few simple words. However my favorite piece of knowledge gained from this morning's session was the benefits bump maps can have to you default modeling textures. Below is my explanation of this using a simple lambert and fractal, connected in the hypershade and set to low alpha gain. hope it is useful! :)