this two tutorials are my contribution for the occult MRfM fan club
How to integrate a mib_texture_filter_lookup node (elliptical filtering) with MRfM (1.5.1). - http://alienbit.com/mrfmtut1.htm
How to create, export, register and use a mental-ray phenomena with MRfM(1.5.1). - http://alienbit.com/mrfmtut3.htm
Thanks for the knowledge sharing. Every little bit helps.
best,
Greg
excellent tutorials... thanks...
ive been through the mentalray rendering book a few times however and cant figure out how to switch out of elliptical filtering... and ideas?
not only, but id like to know how to more accurately control my texture projections?... any suggestions would help... r.
There are a few things I just want to clarify... in order to use a phenomenon to make a DGS shader capable of bump mapping, while retaining the complete functionality of a DGS shader, one would have to connect not just the diffuse and lights channels to an interface node of the phenomenon, but also the glossy, specular, shiny, shinyU, shinyV, trans, and ior parameters, right? Also, it would make sense to create a second phenomenon using the DGS material photon shader, would it not? well, I suppose I could be completely mistaken, but this seems to make sense to me... write back and let me know your thoughts, meanwhile I'll set out to build a fully-functional DGS with bump, along with a DGS photon with bump... it might turn out to be a waste of time, but, hey, its my time to waste ; )
-Steve
p.s. one last thing, do you know how to assign icons to the new shaders? its not a functional issue, its just kind of an annoyance to have it say "can not find (whatever).xpm" and have your new shaders appear as blank boxes... anyway, if you don't, no big deal. Thanks.
also, I can't seem to get the bump to work... I got my phenomenon working (with all of the DGS parameters) but the "tex" area seems quite useless... only file textures seem to be able to be conencted to it (no textures, i.e. fractal, ramp, etc made from within maya), but when I do attach a file texture, no bump appears. I am sure I am doing something wrong... also, how does one control the amount of bump? I assume I am missing something here... shouldn't there be a way to set up the "tex" field so that it has the little connection button, i.e. the way all of the other parameters do? Well, hopefully someone has the answer to this, as I don't know anywhere near enough about mental ray phenomena to know what do to... thanks in advance.
-Steve
ok, little addendum here... I am sure stunndman already knows this, as he seems really knowledgable about phenomenon and whatnot, but I tried taking out the "texture" word in the .mi file... in other words, where we had changed it to color texture "tex", I removed the texture, so it became color "tex", and that put the little connection box I was referring to next to the tex attribute, which allowed me to attach non-file textures... however, it also consistantly and effectively crashes maya any time it starts rendering... so thats no good. anyway, thats just my progress on the matter... chances are stunndman will read this and say "hey, this is what you do" and all will be well ; P
-Steve
hi icktyptang,
definitely - in the tutorial i just wanted to document the basic process - the how to - if anyone has written a useful phenomenon i'll be happy to put it up as a more useful example
the icon must be named render_{phenomenon name}.xpm and must be placed in your .mental ray for Maya 1.5icons folder
regarding the bump map texture - i haven't looked into this issue yet - maybe anyone with the book can figure this out
basically i think the whole phenomenon thing in maya is pretty useless right now - it would make sense if you could use a phenomenon without the export/import overhead - right now you have to restart maya whenever you have modified your phenomenon - hopefully they have resolved this issues in Maya 5 - any beta testers out there who can comment on this ? - and i hope they will update the MRfM for Maya 4.5 plugin so it integrates better with Maya
i'll take a look at the texture issue and will post any findings
the bump factor attribute will control the depth of the bump... needless to say you should include it in your pheno interface...
the offset attribut will control the direction (up, over, left, right) that the bump takes, should you choose...
by the way steve... are you dragging and dropping the texture onto the shader? its unecessary... what is needed is a 2dtexture in the scene, unconnected.... with a reference to its name in the texture field... ie file1:tex
environment:tex
make sure youre not using tifs with LZW compression as Mental Images doesnt have rights to the images format and therefore doesnt support them.
ive built a couple of different shaders using the technique... BlinnBumpReflectRefract etc... but have had trouble so far in gettting a shader that will do colour textures as well.... so I have created a filterTextureLookup phenomenon that feeds into (by drag and drop) diffuse colour... or mayas own colour channel...
Ive got the 5.0 beta and havent had a chance to look at it... send me your email and ill go over it on Monday when i get a chance.... and send the shaders too.
ciao. r.
well, I tried dragging and dropping and it didn't work, so not only is it not necessary, its not possible... but before that I tried putting the name of the texture in... say... file1:tex or whatever, and that allowed it to render, but added no bump, regardless of the image (I am going to try to build my phenomenon again, adding the bump factor attribute, etc, as you suggested)... I also tried using a fractal (named, simply, "fractal1") but when I put fracta1:tex into the field, it wouldn't render. It came back with the errors "undefined ctexture symbol "fractal:tex" " and "undefined color texture "fractal:tex" ." this therefore leads me to beleive that this method only allows for file textures and no 2D texture nodes (i.e. fractals) created within maya. any thoughts for this?
oh, and by the way, what program can I use to make .xpm files?
Ickyptang:
You need: XPM to BMP (and viceversa) in the Maya Tools section on this site....
On the bump issue, I've resorted to 'Convert file texture' in Maya, and reloading into MR, pain in the ****
but does the job..
See my sample Great Dane render in:
'Critique my work for Professionals' section (Great Dane - NURBS Patches WIP )
Roll on M5 (we live in hope - MR 3.2)
Crispy
your dog looks very nice... and thanks for the tip on teh conversion tool. I still can't seem to get bumps to work, however... it'll render when using a file texture (unlike using a procedural node, which, as you said, needs to be converted to a file texture to get to render), but it does not seem to apply any bump... again, I MUST be missing something. anyway, at some point I may figure it out... I'll have to go over that turorial again, but I am sure I followed it exactly. oh well.