This seemed to plop down some sort of 2D texture projection node inside of Maya, but it honored the UV's and fixed the problem. I remedied this by assigning a 'Maya Image File' instead of just 'Image File' in slim. Two of three of the objects with non-tillable textures would have their UV's offset in some manor, even though the UV's appeared intact and Slim was using the ST coordinate space. Fixing this was a murky process that involved unassigning the shader, deleting history, renaming the shader, optimizing the scene, waving your arms in the air and re-assigning it.Īnother interesting bug was one that seemed to be present in the texture space assignments. Since bump displacements are assigned to a sort of 'shading group' (the Ensemble node), the new shading group would not register with the object if it already had the Delux node assigned as a surface shader. The Delux node would be plugged into an Ensemble which would also have a bump 'displacement' attached.ĭuring this process I encountered some bugs/limitations in Slim, most notably when trying to apply a bump displacement to a surface shader that was already assigned in Maya. For the conversion, I built all of these shaders from the ground up in Slim, usually using a Delux node to bring in as many shading components as I needed (diffuse, specular, reflective, incandescence, sub surface scattering, etc). I had used MR materials for all of the glass, the silky fabric, highly reflective metals and two or three surfaces that required sub surface scattering. The file nodes and other hypershade nodes stayed intact, for the most part.Ĭonverting the more complex Mental Ray shaders was the meat of the project. It was fairly easily to do within Maya by simply changing the type to 'Blinn' and adjusting a few settings. Malcolm sat down and wrote a python script which is included at the bottom of the page.īecause Renderman does't support the Phong shading model within Maya, these shaders had to be converted to something like Blinn. This could have been done by using txmake, but for 66 separate images, an automatic scripted approach is preferable.

The first step was creating TEX files from the PNG file textures I had created several months ago. After removing effects such as the Mental Ray camera lens shader and switching off the Mental Ray area light shapes, I got an image where all of the Mental Ray materials appeared black and all of the Phongs were gray-shaded. I began by simply switching the renderer to Renderman and hitting the render button. Batch Render.This animated GIF shows the progression from the first image out of Renderman to the final. Step 3: Save the scene making sure that the project is set accordingly with folders. Step 2: Frame the scene so the camera encompasses all geometry. Shading rate can be adjusted for optimal quality or preview. Now adjust the radiosity pass attributes by making sure that the cull settings are turned OFF. Though we will not be using radiosity, the node is necessary to write the file and adjust quality.

You will then see that a radiosity pass is added. Press the checkered icon next to Bake Shadowing (we're still in the light attributes!). In order for Renderman For Maya (RFM) to write out a particle cloud, you must tell the light to bake the map out. Max Variation defaults to 10 - 1 will give the best results. Step 1: Create a Renderman Environment Light.Ĭhange to 'sampled' for sampling mode and start with 256 for higher quality sampling.

Steps for creating a Point Cloud (ptc file) in Renderman For Maya: The following covers the process of creating a point cloud using Renderman For Maya.

Renderman environment light