Mila and metal shaders - 2016

#1

Hi guys - I’m struggling to get started with Mila shaders in 2016. Right now I’m trying to make a basic aluminium metal shader. So it should have a partial diffuse component, as well as blurred reflections, and soft specular highlights (with anisotropic control over the highights).

Aluminium is very easy to create with Mia shaders and get high quality fast renders. I have been able to reproduce this somewhat with Mila but render times are horrendously bad (up to 5 times as long, and the blurred reflections still look terrible).

I’m hoping my noob shader setup is the problem lol - it would be great if someone can advise of the basic setup for such a shader and/or provide any info about where I might be going wrong. Thanks in advance.

#2

My simplest MILA aluminum shader starts as a dark diffuse, then ads a glossy reflection with a weight of .955 and roughness of .82 (or whatever you want). Dial in as much anisotropy as you need for brushed or not.

Key thing is to set up a facing ratio ramp to match aluminum’s reflectivity curve to match what’s given on http://refractiveindex.info/ or I guess you can dial in their refractive index number and shoot refractive rays, but IMO that’s a waste when you don’t need to and have the raw reflectivity data

#3

Hi thanks for the reply. I’m finding Mila shaders unusable - I’ve tried that setup as well as a slightly less rough glossy reflection layer, but it renders about 10 x slower than a simple Mia shader, and is grainy as hell. Increasing Quality on the Extra Attributes tab improves this but you really need to increase to 4, and Unified globals to 1.5, at which point renders are orders of magnitude slower.

I have to assume that these are beta shaders and no-one is actually using them in production yet?

#4

been using them in production with maya 2015 for a year over here. They’ve been great for us - fast and higher quality than MIA for most of of our scenes.

We’re not using unified sampling or importance sampling though.

Right now I’m getting 2x longer render times in maya 2016 than 2015 and not sure why. Tried all the suggestions so far. Still investigating, but going to skip over using 2016 anyway given all the problems people have had.