MetaSL shaders in Maya 2011

[ruediger]

For those working with Maya 2011 there is a good tutorial on how to get MetaSL shaders to work with the mental ray renderer. Now you can author your shader in mental mill with the help of the graphical debugger and the mental ray preview plugin.
Just follow the link and you will be guided through the necessary steps how to set up everything so that it works smoothly.

http://forum.mentalimages.com/showthread.php?t=7092

There are a few things that you need to take care of in order to have a smooth experience. I will report them in a seperate post what you need to take care of.

Best Regards,
Ruediger

[ruediger]

Here is an example shader to test the workflow from mental mill to maya.

This shader works smoothly in mental mill. If you read the page in the link above carefully you know all the things you need to know if you want to use your MetaSL shader in Maya 2011.

The shader is a Mandelbrot and Julia fractal set. (Just in case you want to see the typical mandelbrot, you need to set the shader parameters "fractal type" to 0 as well as "start_real" and "start_imaginary" must be set to 0 as well)

This post comes with both the .msl file for mental mill and the .mi file for maya. The shader runs perfectly within mental mill and maya. However, if you are the owner of a good GPU you will have a lot of fun playing with the fractal in the realtime preview of mental mill.

Tips / Remarks:

• The shader input paramater 'abort_distance' can be used to tweak the appearance of the fractal artistically. Slowly decrease it and you will see how the look of the fractal changes considerably. Values lower than 1 will make the fractal look very cartoony.

[DQvsRA]

And How to connect them? To color or what? Spend about hour to looking on the parameters and true different variant of connection and nothing at all.

[ruediger]

The output of the shader is of type color. You can feed it to any color input of another node. You can provide the color for the diffuse color of an illumination_phong node, for example.

[SaintSammy]

This shader works smoothly in mental mill.



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