Layering Arnold Shaders

#1

Hi,

Like Vray’s blend shader is there any way to do similar layering with Arnold shaders?
Or do we have to go the native metal ray mia material layering option with layered shader?

Would love to hear any tips on this.

Thank You
-Gov

#2

Just use Maya Layered shader(compositing flag = layered texture) and mix ai shaders with it.
Should work with AOVs properly also.

#3

Just like you do it with Mental Ray’s mia materials, right?

#4

With mentalray i use only MR shades, othervise you get problems in passes.

#5

Kiryha, what I meant was; Is the process same as the one in this video or is there anything I have to keep in mind, like Arnold specific. For Example: The opaque option that we need to be aware of when creating refractive objects.

#6

Yep, same workflow, as in video. Just try it :slight_smile:

#7

Great. Thank You!

#8

What kind of problems? I thought it was ok to mix maya shaders with MR shaders, but I haven’t gone too crazy with passes, mainly due to fear of something breaking. Rendering in MR is such a huge undocumented minefield…

#9

Why mix maya shaders with MR shaders is bed idea ?
I dont know how to explain such obvious things- its much harder than explain complex stuff.
Also i cant imagine any reason why you wish to use old crapy shaders when you have new and amazing. Just dont do it ever. Like cutout opacity. But you can use all maya textures and utilities with MR without any issues.

>MR is such a huge undocumented minefield
So true!

#10

I was simply referring to the use of the maya layered texture node and surface shader to get a Miax layered shader. If I were to use this technique, I would have problems with passes? I know I can use the color mix node to make a layered shader as well, but it’s a more convoluted setup and again, I’m not even sure that’s ok to use if I want my passes to work…

#11

The Vray blend material has several slots for both more shaders and alphas (coat and blen amount).

Can you use this if you want to have for example three shaders connected?

#12

Sorry, I think I kinda derailed the thread a little. I was following up on the comment about only using all mr nodes in a shader when rendering with mental ray, otherwise there will be problems with passes.

Vray doesn’t have this problem because chaos group gives a crap about providing a complete and clear workflow for maya users. :stuck_out_tongue:

#13

May be I should have named the thread as ‘Layering Shaders.’
Its interesting to see lot of talks about different techniques.

One quick addition, When I did what the video I posted above showed, lot many passes from Mental Ray were black (even though I used mia_material_xpasses).
I hope Arnold doesn’t do that. I haven’t tried it yet. Will do it soon and post my results soon.

#14

It is working great…!!

but with layered texture, it is notoriously slow to render :frowning:

#15

In case someone lands up in this thread for the same reason that I created this thread, there is another method of layering shaders in Arnold without using Maya’s Layered shader.

Before I say how, I am not against using Maya layered shader but it gets really clustered and if we have a big shader chain going on then it gets a little cumbersome (in my opinion).

An amazing shader writer named Anders Langlands (if I am not wrong, he is the creative director at Solid Angle now), who has created few shaders for MtoA has a alLayer shader that allows you to connect two surface shaders, its neat.

Go check it out at this link - https://bitbucket.org/anderslanglands/alshaders/wiki/Home

I have used it and its great, he has few other amazing shaders too.

Regards!

**NOTE:- The shaders are WIP. And according Solid Angle and will soon become a production library.
If you choose to use a texture map (for JPEG or similar), make sure your “alpha is luminance” is turned on under color balance of your fileTexture node, that’s it :slight_smile: