Show in Contents

Add to Favorites

Home: Autodesk Maya Online Help
mental ray for Maya shaders

Basics of mental ray for Maya shading

mental ray for Maya textures
mental ray Shader connections
The
following mental ray shader parameter types are recognized as message attribute
by Maya: light, geometry, color texture, scalar texture, vector
texture, lightprofile, shader.
Though it is possible
to connect any node to these attributes, you should make only those
connections that Maya expects, otherwise a crash or rendering abort
may occur. That is, if you drag a node to the message attribute
in the Attribute editor, the message
attribute of the source node will be connected to the attribute
(for example node1.message > mrShaderNode.shader), but only the
following connections are recognized and will work in Maya:
- light : light transform node. For example,
pointLight1.message > dgs_material1.lights[0]
- geometry : geometry shader. For example,
mib_geo_sphere1.message > mib_geo_instance1.object
- shader : mental ray shader. For example,
mib_illum_phong1.message > mib_geo_instance.material
- color texture, scalar texture, vector
texture: mentalrayTexture node. For example, mentalrayTexture1.message
> mib_texture_lookup1.tex. The button next to a color/scalar/vector
texture attribute in the shader's attribute editor will create a
new mentalrayTexture node, and connect it to the attribute.
- lightprofile : mentalrayLightProfile
node. For example, mentalrayLightProfile1.message -> mib_light_photometric.profile.
The button next to a lightprofile attribute in the shader's attribute
editor will create a new mentalrayLightProfile node, and connect
it to the attribute.
- input-to-input connections, that let
you render more dependency graph connection in Maya scenes.
NoteBreaking an input-to-input
connection causes all the dependent nodes in the chain to lose their
inputs.