Lovin' VRAY for Maya's VRAY Blend material

Sometimes the most simple things tweak my brain. I remember the pain of having
to use mix8 nodes in Mental Ray. This mucho bettero.
1. slap down a vray blend MTL.
2. Throw a semi transparent shader in as your base.
3. add in another shader with a blend amount or use a texture to determine blend amounts.

That's it. Insta-layered shader. Awesome.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
Transferring UVs AFTER rigging.... This is a tough one, but here's the HACK. Lets say you've rigged up your amazing character and realize OH, I have to make a bunch of UV changes. You copy out your character's head, UV it up nicely, bring it back in and use the "transfer attributes" from your copied head to the rigged one. No deal. It's because your transfer attributes input comes after rigging and all UV inputs have to come before rigging. Same as in Ncloth. I don't understand why Autodesk doesn't put in a "before deformers" option or something similar to how you can insert blendshapes at certain parts of a deformer chain. ANYWAY Every object has a "shape orig" node which represents what an object was before it was deformed. We can apply a UV transfer to this no problem which will also transfer up the stack to your rigged object. I access it like this 1. Select your rigged object, in the hypergraph hit options/display/ hidden nodes...
Read more
STUFF LEARNED ABOUT OBJECT TRAVEL ACROSS SURFACE Oh dear... Sometimes trying to acomplish the most simple things leads to many discoveries about the tools that you use. I will most definitely have to catalogue this because I don't want to have to figure this out in the future.... Techniques to have multiple objects travel across a surface in random different directions while obeying surface normals and directions. My first intuition was to run random instanced particles across a surface and somehow stick them to the surface. This can be done. Make a surface live, sketch particles on, throw down some gravity and get those particles moving... *but what if you need to direct those particles and also have them 'stick on'? Gravity will tell them that if they hit an edge, to fall off the surface. Plus with fields, you can't direct particles as precise as a picky client wants them :) So I figured, why not make the surface a goal? Great! So the particles move towards the vertic...
Read more
Image
PHYSICAL SUN AND SKY WITH FG This will be a running journal of mental ray's new physical sun and sky in maya 8.5. In Maya 8.5 , go to your render settings and in the mental ray tab under environment you´ll find Physical Sun and Sky - hit create ( also make sure you enable FG ) * What happens when you hit the Create button? A directional light is created with a mia_physicalsun attached to it's mental ray light shader slot. This light will mimic the sun and yep, to the point where when you rotate the light the light will adjust to obey physical sunlight. Also, a mia_physicalsky is attached to the environment of your camera, simulating sky and atmosphere. Lastly a lens shader named mia_exposure_simple is connected to your camera. By default you´ll get a very accurate rendering of a daylight scene *To add clouds to your sky, plug a spherical environment map into the haze parameter of mia_physicalsky http://mentalraytips.blogspot.com/ *Sky Textures http://www.1000skies.com/ http...
Read more