RenderLayers Maya 7 - Multi Shaders per object

[rcronin]

Has anyone found an answer to this? It seems bizarre that Alias would release a new feature that can't deal with something so simple as per face material assignment per layer!?

[strange_quark]

welcome to hell my friend!!!

yes its hard to believe, but they have released a new feature - render layers (and a main reason I upgraded) and it is practicly un-usable...

/* ignore this if you want...
I can give you some other examples: create a render layer for some objects turn off the primary visibility. save your file - reopen...everything is fine right? ok now add more objects to that render layer... select them and turn thier primary vis off... save file. open again....."oh awesome!" you say... now your objects have primary visibility turned off for EVERY LAYER THEY ARE ON, INCLUDING THE MAIN LAYER. to fix this is a pain in the ass.
*/ end ignoreing me....

ok, here's what i've found you can do for your specific situation. after looking at the connections to the shading groups and the layerManager nodes there is only one way to reliably change materials on render layers. You *must* go find the materials in the hyper shade, do "select connected to this material" on the original materials, and then right click and "assign material to slection" to the material you want it to be on THIS current layer. this way you always keep a 1:1 ratio of matierial selection groups on every layer. (otherwise it gets all fackd, as u are experiencing)

for instance, if you have a character with 4 materials on it, and you want make the whole character surface shader "blackMatte". you must assign the "blackMatte" material 4 times, by going thru the origial 4, 1 by 1, and assigning that way.

this seems to be the only way. tedious and stupid you say?!? WHY YES, IT IS!

All of this crap isn't documented anywehre in the maya help and its basicly totaly insane that they give us this crap and expect us to figure this out for ourselves while in production environment....putting clients and artists at risk.

ok, sorry to flame.

hope i helped.

(p.s. shame on you alias!)
(p.p.s. ok, seriously....i'm done ranting.)

[MasonDoran]

yes its definatly buggy....even to the point of screwing up the Master Layer Shader assignments.


You can also assign Shading Group Overrides...but you will have to do this for every shader.

All this works fine on small scenes...but in a production sense with hundreds of materials and objects it is not very practical.

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