PDA

View Full Version : Mental Ray contour transparency problem with switch to Maya 6.5

J-Wicz
02-11-2005, 07:04 AM
Hi everyone

I have a problem with contour rendering in Maya 6.5 / Mental Ray.

I usually use a bit of tranparency on a shader so when I render contours it provides me a full wireframe rendering, which we can use later in compositing (Maya 6.0)
While switching to Maya 6.5 this suddenly doesn't work anymore. I can only render edges which are visible! Please see the attached image.

I searched CG-Talk but there is no information on this specialised issue.

I tried the "Pass Custom Alpha Channel" in hope it will eventually solve my problem but it didn't. I tried with standard Maya lambert, dgs (directly connected) and dgs plugged into a maya surface shader with no success.

The Mental Ray documentation does not mention anything about changes to their contour dlls either

http://www.orangelab.de/tempphj/forumposts/contour65.jpg

Does anyone have the same problem or did I srew up some settings?
Any suggestion?

Thanks
cheers
Philipp
J-Wicz
03-18-2005, 02:22 PM
for the sake of completness I'm replying to myself

I'm not to much of an expert, but I think what happend between maya 6.0 and maya 6.5 is that the default value for the "contour contrast shader" was changed. Especially the min_level and max_level (see metal ray documentaion for more info)

What solved my problem was the following:
in the render globals under => contour tab => custom shaders subtab I pluged in two custom shader.

For contrast I plugged a "contour_contrast_function_levels" and increased the min_level and max_level. Because the contour rendering didn't render properly anymore I also plugged a "contour_store_function" into the store shader (this node does not have any attibutes to alter). Now I am getting the same bevaiour like in Maya 6.0 again.

Hope that helps some of the rare MR contour users out there too.

cheers
Philipp
CGTalk Moderation
03-18-2005, 02:22 PM
This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.