Shader preview in hypershade

[frischa]

hi,

does somebody know what i have to do do get a preview of a shader made by myself in the hypershade? at the moment there is only the maya-logo. i rendered a sphere with my shader and put the outputimage (400x400) in a subfolder .mayaswatches but i didn't work. the maya logo is still there.

[frischa]

i forgot to say that i've exported my shader in a directory myShaders. when i browse with the hypershader through that directory there is only the node of my Shader with the maya-logo.

[swaroop-1]

I don't know how to get that icon back, but if you don't know yet, you can get ALOT better preview of your shader(s) by assigning it to a object, and then IPR rendering and marguee selecting the object in the IPR render window: Et voila! (Nearly) realtime preview of your shader on any kind of object, not just a small preview of a sphere

I'm sorry if you need the icon to pick a particular shader out of thousand others or something like that, as then IPR won't propably do much good for you

[frischa]

"'...sorry if you need the icon to pick a particular shader out of thousand others..." but that is what i need. i select the directory with my exported shaders and i got all shader-nodes with a rendered picture of the shader. is there no solution for this problem?

[deke-kincaid]

This sounds like one of 2 problems.
1.) Your video card drivers. Could be buggy drivers especially if it is a gforce cards. Are all the nodes in the tree showing up with the maya icon when you graph a network? If so then this is probably your problem. Don't post a question asking what driver to use, this question is asked every other week. Just search highend there are 1000 different discussions about gforce drivers and which one to use.

2.) When you graph a shader only the shader node is showing up with the maya icon but everything else is showing up with proper swatches? If so are you using a plugin shader? This is a known api bug, all you need to do is turn off auto load on the plugin. If the scene has that 3rd party shader then it will turn it on when you load up the scene, or just turn it on manually when you start up maya.

[frischa]

it's not problem number one

ahh it's hard to explain because my english isn't very good at all but i will do my best.

in the hypershade i've to sections. one section with the tabs "materials, textures, utilities, lights, cameras, projects", the other one with the tabs "WorkArea" and "myShaders" this tab was created by myself with type "disk" and now shows the directory structure (explorer like)where my exported shaders are. when i now select the directory with my shaders, i only see nodes with a maya icon, but instead of that icon i want a little preview picture! when i import that shader everything is fine and a litte preview is shown. but i don't wanna import every shader first to know how it looks like!
when i browse a directory with image-files i got a preview and thats what i want for shader-files (*.ma).

[joojaa]

Aaah actually i was wondering about this too yesterday (i dont realy have much use for this but)... It seemed to work in older verions of maya perfectly, but now its broken again (i just reinstalled my sytem anew so im not realy sure it might just be my setup).

Anyways you need some 64*64 (actually any size is fine)maya iif files named yourfilename.extension.swatch (not swatches) in the .mayaSwatches directory.

For some reason i dont get maya to do theese automaticaly anymore (and whan i do they are swatshes files that dont seem to be images at all).

Anyways go figure!

[frischa]

ah thank you very much! it works!! the only thing was that i had to save the image like this: shadername.iff.swatch and then renamed to shadername.ma . i tried it with shadername.ma.swatch but the consequence was that the image wasn't recognized as a swatch file.