Mentalray

Mental Ray Override Material (Maya)

Quick post on a very useful but obscure attribute that can be added to any geometry so you can override the material that is assigned to it.

A practical use for this would be fur/hair in Maya. As by default hair and fur is shaded by Maya’s default shaders. These shaders are hard coded into Maya, and there is no usual way of just selecting the feedbackshape/pfxHair and assigning any shader you want to it.
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Monday, February 15th, 2010 RnD, Tutorial No Comments

New shaders + linear tools

Hi all I have just compiled new shaders for mentalray:

ar_shaderPack-0.2.tar.gz

New features ::

  • ar_pointPosition — misc shader for generating screen and or world space position of current surface point
  • ar_bufferWrite — now working with named buffers

Also you can now download a little tool for converting tifs to linear openEXRs

sRGB2Linear.zip

This file contains executables for linux 32 and 64 bit, intel based mac os x, and windows 32 bit.

You will need to have openexr and tiff libraries installed on linux and mac os x .

useage:
from a console/terminal simply run :

sRGB2Linear “file_to_be_converted.tif”

this will spit out an exr image that can then be used as your colour texture inside your rendering package.

Tutorials should be out by the end of next week.

Ash -out

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Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 RnD No Comments