Mental Ray render colors washed out

#1

Using Maya 2016 on Mac Sierra and purchased a low poly model from cgi-trader. I’ve attached screenshots of the model in Viewport 2.0 screen then screenshot of actual lowrez render using MR. Also attached screen captures of my MR render settings. Have3 point light system set up in model; directional and two point lights. Can’t figure out why the palm trees have no color in addition to the overall scene having a brownish cast to it with shades of blue.

Am a Maya


noobie so any help is greatly appreciated.

#2

Under preferences check you color management settings

#3

It appears that many of your models here are simply not using the mental ray shaders, but rather the default Lambert1 shader.

When you’re creating material shaders for mental ray, be sure to open the Shading Group of your material and go to the mental ray section. Here is where you’ll connect your mental ray shaders, generally the mia_material_x or _passes shader, or MILA materials if you’re using the newest type. I still use the mia_material_xp for almost everything I do in mental ray.

#4

First off thanks guys for your responses. Damaggio, here’s screenshot of my color management settings; set to default.

InfernalDarkness, being a noobie I will assume I need to open each objects shading group individually and set material shader to mia_material_xp as you’ve shown. I’m not sure how to go about doing that. For instance, here’s a screenshot of a tree I’ve selected in the scene with the attribute editor shown to the right with PolygonPirates_Mat_01_A tab selected. Also Outliner window with that specific tree highlighted.

Thanks again for your time and help. Much appreciated.

#5

Well color management is disabled, that’s what happens when you get older files from other people… just enable it …: that is the first step, let’s see how it goes.

#6

Thanks Damaggio. I did enable it and did a quick render but no change. Please see InfernalDarkness post. That might be the solution but I responded that I’m not really sure how to go about implementing his suggestion. You can see the various screenshots I made of the relevant Maya windows.

Cheers.

#7

There’s a lot on this scene to cover up, it sounds like you know very little about Maya and rendering in general, we gonna be going back and forth on this, your shaders have reflection at 1 and you are not using any mia material x yet so there’s a lot to learn here, I would suggest taking a break and watching some good tutorials about Maya and mental Ray so you can take your scene further, you also have a ship model in there , there must be a lot of shaders.
Take a little break .

#8

Good advice Damaggio. There is definitely a lot of stuff in the scene. I’ll research some video tutorials on Maya and Mental Ray. Hopefully with perseverance and finding good sources I’ll figure it out :slight_smile:

Thanks!

#9

And as final advice consider learning a new render engine , mental ray no longer exist , try Vray , renderman, redshift , Arnold to name a few.

#10

I will check those out. Thanks Damaggio.

#11

Damaggio is correct, you NEED Color Management on to make any rendering engine look natural. Prior to Linear lighting WorkFlow (LWF, it’s usually called) everyone had to struggle to get lights and materials to behave naturally. LWF changed all that, giving materials the proper color space to work with lights in a linear fashion.

For each Phong material in your scene, you need to override the Phong as I showed in my previous screenshot with a mental ray material. MR can render Maya materials, but they won’t be linearized, will look terrible, and will actually render slower than native MR materials.

This scene you’re working with is pretty heavy for a newcomer to Maya, but you do have a finite amount of shaders to reconstruct and it’s totally possible to do. Make your first mia_material_xp for that tree foliage Phong. You can keep the Phong, I suggest you do keep all your existing shaders, but you need to attach the mia_materials into the mental ray Custom section of each shading group.

After you make your first mia_material_xp for that foliage, you can Duplicate the mia_material in Hypershade, rename the new one “mia_TreeBark_xp” or something handy, and then tweak the bark shader to match the existing bark’s Phong. Then connect your mia_TreeBark_xp to that Phong’s Custom section in the shading group, and do this for all your materials. It may take awhile but trust me, it’s totally doable.

Here’s an example of work-in-progress scene and shader progression, all done in mental ray using the mia_material_x_passes shaders for every single material: