Benefit of Mental Ray Production Shaders?

#1

Can someone explain how MR Production Shaders are better than Use Background and Surface Shaders?

Thanks in advance!

#2

Hi overEZ,

For one thing the maya usebackground material cannot be used to provide a reflection of a background image on to your cg geometry.
This is particularly useful where the background image has a ground or a floor.
There are many other uses with lots of helpful online resources posted by artists.

Here is a link to the production shader document.
http://www.nvidia-arc.com/fileadmin/user_upload/PDF/production.pdf

If you didn’t already know, to enable the mip materials, type and execute the following into the mel scripted editor then restart maya

optionVar -intValue MIP_SHD_EXPOSE 1;

In case it isn’t obvious, this only works with mentalray.

#3

Quite old masterclass from Master Zap but still very useful.

http://area.autodesk.com/masterclasses/masterclass/class09_mray

He uses max but the shaders are the same.

#4

Can’t believe they are still hidden those shaders !

#5

Thanks a lot for the replies and links!

I am looking forward to trying them out. I feel very comfortable using Use Background and Surface shaders… but I know I must go outside my comfort zone to grow!
Cheers!