Shading Group attributes
In the Shading Group’s Attribute
Editor, the mental ray section contains the following
options:
Flags
These are the options in the Flags section.
- Opaque
-
Turn this on if the material is fully opaque.
It should assist in speeding up mental ray rendering.
- Transparency Threshold
-
Tweak this transparency threshold so that
all surface points that are less opaque than specified by this attribute
will be considered non-existent. For example, a value of 0.05 removes
all surface points with a transparency of 99.5% or more.This allows
your object to appear cut out from the texture. An example is to
map an image of a tree to a flat plane and use opacity to cut away
the parts of the tree that are not there.
Contours
These are the options in the Contours section.
Each shading group can have individual contour rendering attributes
defined. Set the following options to achieve the desired look.
See also
Contours in
the Rendering guide.
- Enable Contour Shading
-
Enables contour shading for all objects associated
with the shading group.
- Color
-
The color of the contour lines. This attribute
can only be a color and cannot have a procedural or texture map
connected to it.
- Alpha
-
The alpha of the contour lines.
- Width
-
The width of the contour lines.
- Relative Width
-
If off, Width is
specified as (fractional) number of pixels. If on, Width is
specified in percents of the horizontal image resolution thus maintaining
the relative contour size if the resolution changes.
- Absolute Width
-
If on, Absolute Width is
specified in percents of the horizontal image resolution set by
the user.
Custom Shaders
These are the options in the Custom
Shaders section.
- Suppress all Maya Shaders
-
Use this for backwards compatibility as it disables
automatic translation of Maya shaders. Only the mental ray ports
are evaluated and exported.
- Export with Shading Engine/Export
with Volume Sampler
-
When turned on, these both insert additional helper
shaders into the export stream. These shaders are required if you
want to write custom shaders that cooperate with the Maya base shader
package delivered with mental ray for Maya. These options are for
advanced mental ray for Maya users only.
NoteThe Export with Shading
Engine attribute is available for backward compatibility.
It should not be used for tuning and should be disabled in most cases.