Native mental ray light linking

 
 
 

Beginning Maya 2008, mental ray for Maya uses native mental ray light linking. Shaders are no longer responsible for their own light linking. All the Maya linking information is automatically handled by the mental ray core and shaders automatically receive the relevant light information.

All of the mental ray shaders provided with Maya have been set to automatically work with this new feature. The light linking mode has been preset for you.

This feature also simplifies your workflow for integrating custom mental ray shaders. Previously, to make use of Maya light linking, shaders would have required special purpose code. This code can now be safely removed. Refer to the examples and readme.txt in Maya2013/mentalray/devkit/docs/writingShaders for more information.

Note

If you have a scene created using Maya 8.5 or any earlier version of Maya, you may need to re-export your .mi files to mental ray.

Light linking modes

All mental ray shaders have a choice of 4 light linking modes. You can set this mode under the Light Linking section of the mental ray shader node.