Saturday 1 October 2016

Recreation of the Learn Vray course shaders within Maya - (Instead of 3ds Max)

Studio max has many advantages over Maya for shader creation, especially when it comes to procedural texturing. The alternative for detailed procedural texturing in Maya is to use a plugin like Filter Forge for Photoshop that can generate large tileable textures. It's a some what poor work around but people like Alex Alvarez use this method to create detailed terrains in Maya/Mental Ray - see HERE. Hopefully Maya will some have better procedurals that work with renders like Vray, Arnold and Redshift soon.

Another annoyance is that curves in Maya don't have bezier handles but, by using splines, the same result as in max, can be achieved.

Below I have replicated shaders from the "Learn Vray" course. See 3ds Max versions HERE.

I've scripted them into a UI which has formed an ever growing library. They need a little tweaking but I will do that as I use them. This is what I love about Maya - MEL and Python scripting.



Here's how some of them look on the Learn Vray course shader ball, cloth and Gargoyle.

4 comments:

  1. great! I'm trying to convert many materials but do not get it. how do you do it?

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    1. Hi. Basically I script shading networks that reference my texture library with mel or python in maya. I then use actions in photoshop to output texture sets with a suffix number so that I can switch between them in maya very easily - again with scripts.

      If you look at the network setup in max it should be fairly easy to find similar nodes that do the job in maya. The lack of proceduals is annoying though and textures often aren't as useful, fast or clean.

      I might do a blog post about it some time if I have time.

      Thanks for dropping by :)

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    2. will be so nice make short tutorials on the process. i get difficulties converting vray max materials to maya.
      thank you for tips. great works here

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    3. will be so nice make short tutorials on the process. i get difficulties converting vray max materials to maya.
      thank you for tips. great works here

      Delete