Beginner Questions - Help?

#1

Hello, folks - I’m currently self-teaching Maya 2012, and I’m really enjoying it! I ran into two issues that are probably simple to you vets, but I could use a hand to get going.

  1. I have been exploring glass and metal through mental ray shaders, but have found that, when rendering, my standard Maya lamberts (non-mental ray) are disregarded. I have my “Render Using” setting set to mental ray, but was under the impression that it would also render non-mental ray specific shaders. Here is the space ship that I created to experiment with; in this render output, you can see both the glass and metal mental ray shaders, but not the solid colored lamberts applied to the wings.

Does mental ray rendering not cover standard lamberts as I thought, or have I set up the render settings improperly?

  1. Is it possible to add a shader to individual faces as opposed to an entire object, or does it require fully unwrapping the UV?

  2. What are some potential reasons for two vertices to not be merged together? Merging was not an issue on the ship itself when I wanted to attach individually-modeled objects (like the nose), but when I tried to merge the fins to the underwing missiles, Maya would “execute” the merge as if it was successful, but the two remained separate.

Thank you very much for your patience. Modeling is very rewarding, but can be slow to learn at times!

#2

  1. You really should use mia_material_x_passes for everything (except special things like shadow catchers). Just set reflection weight to 0 if you want a lambert reflection. (although I’d recommend something like 0.1 reflectivity with fresnel reflections on. Not quite as fast, but will give it a subtle realistic shine). In your particular case, yes it should work in theory. But replacing the lamberts with mia_materials is probably a better use of your time than trying to track down where it’s going wrong.

  2. Yes, just select the faces in component mode and apply the material like normal.

  3. The merge tool has a distance limit, did you check this was set high enough? (you should be able to adjust this after the fact from the tool history)

#3

HI,

  For creating Glass material you cannot use "Lambert" material as it doesn't consist the specular sheding parameter. Use "Blinn" for the metal or glass. instead These will give you the desired result. And Yes Mental Ray DO support the standard Maya materials but preffered the mia materials for better and in detail calculations.

Regards,

#4

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