Materials.

Materials

Materials are, just that, materials you make your models out of. When you start a scene, you always start with a basic Lambert material ,which is is given to each new object. (WARNING, it doesn't make a new material, it just uses the first default, so if you edit the default, you will affect the future models!) Materials can range from a very basic plastic like Lambert, a shiny metal like Blinn. Changing it's reflective properties, how transparent it is, what colour it is, Hell, even special effects, ray tracing options, and so on!... But those are for another day.

Textures.

Textures... Are complicated. To be very concise, they're customised materials that you pasted a bitmap image over (Or drew it on manually, but same idea). The Textures, are ATTACHED to the material itself, and not the object, so make sure if you put a texture onto a material, that that material isn't shared anywhere else... Otherwise... Weird stuff may happen.

Foggy material.

Now for fog! My actually most beloved feature in Maya. Fog is made from a Volume primative (Which comes with a default fog material, for the volume, the space between the faces and vertices). And you can do... Amazing stuff. From  an actual fog, to even blue glowing fire! It will give you a transparent material that stacks with depth of the object, and not per face. (So it gives a fog effect and not a veil effect.)