Procedural Texture Shader

This section shows the basic workflow for mental ray for Maya procedural texture shaders.

References:

• mental ray User Manual, Chapter 3.9.
• mental ray Shaders Guide, Chapter 1.4.
• Rendering with mental ray, Chapter 4.2, Appendix C.

Where to find texture shaders
Material shaders appear in the hypershade -> Create mental ray Nodes -> Textures.

The following procedural texture shaders are shipped with Maya:

• mib_texture_checkerboard
• mib_texture_polkadot
• mib_texture_polkasphere
• mib_texture_turbulence
• mib_texture_wave

Default behavior

Right-mouse button click a texture shader, then select "Assign Texture's material to selection" to create a new Lambert shader with the texture shader connected to the color attribute of the Lambert, then assign it to the selection.

In this example, a 2d procedural texture mib_texture_checkerboard is used.

Step 1. Getting Ready

Make sure the mental ray for Maya plug-in is loaded:

• Windows > Settings/Preferences > Plug-in Manager...
• Find Mayatomr and check loaded

Open the scene we will use for this section: proceduralTextures_start.ma.

Step 2. Create a texture shader

• Create a checkerboard shader
• Hypershade > Create mental ray Nodes -> Textures
• Select mib_texture_checkerboard
• Assign the texture to a material shader
• We’ll use the default lambert shader
• Ctrl MMB drag and drop mib_texture_checkerboard to lambert1.
• mib_texture_checkerboard1.outValue should is connected to lambert1.color.

Step 3. Setting up texture space
We will use mib_texture_vector and mib_texture_remap to setup the texture space.

• Create mib_texture_vector.
  This shader produces texture coordinates based on the parameters.
• Create mib_texture_remap.
  This shader takes texture coordinate as its "input", and manipulates it further.
• Connect mib_texture_vector1 to mib_texture_remap.
• The connection is from outValue of mib_texture_vector1 to input of mib_texture_remap.
• Finally, connect mib_texture_remap to coord parameter of the checkerboard shader .

Then, render with mental ray.
A black and white checker appears in the Render View window.

Step 4. mib_texture_checkerboard
mental ray Shaders Guide, Chapter 1.4 Textures, describes this shader.

Open the Attribute Editor of mib_texture_checkerboard1, and try different settings.

The scene is saved as proceduralTextures_finish.ma.

mib_texture_checkerboard.

proceduralTextures_finish.ma