Vray-Maya Material Preset

[thhvfx]

Hi guys,

I remember Vray used to have material presets where you could quickly apply a material to an object. I just couldn't find it anywhere now. I found something similiar for Max here https://www.sigerstudio.eu/ . It would be nice if someone can help me out.

Thanks

[SonyBoy]

Not sure what you mean, unless you're simply looking for the "Presets" button right in the attribute editor (with the shader selected, top right)? But Vray does not ship with presets (except on the SSS shader SFAIK) and you have to create these yourself. If you're talking about something like the Sunday Warehouse shader library system, those are external/third party to Vray.

[thhvfx]

Sorry, that was mia_material_preset https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yzc_q_g_y04
It would be nice if Vray could have something similiar like that. Quick access to standard material like metal, glass, rubber, car paint, chrome, water, ...etc

[SonyBoy]

You can create and save your own presets using the preset button....

[yolov]

Now that you mention it, we are actually thinking of adding presets to the vrayMtl. Which brings up a question: if there were presets - would it be better to have them in the Maya preset menu (mentioned in the posts above) or as a drop-down like we have it for the fastSSS2 and hair materials?

And another question - if you choose a preset and then modify it further, say you connect a bump map,but then you choose another preset - would like us to keep the texture connections or reset all parameters? Or an option for that?

[SonyBoy]

It would be better to at least keep any preset options consistent across shader types, so as long as they remain organized that way on the SSS shader I'd say do the same for all others. The "Presets" button is currently designed for user-created presets anyway, so it would seem confusing to put anything that ships with Vray in there. So far as maintaining connections to other nodes, that is a rabbit hole but I would guess that yes if a shader already has those sorts of incoming connections then a user is going to want to maintain them if switching presets. Or, as you say, at least an option to nuke them or save them. But to expand on this idea a bit, what I'd really love to see is some sort of comprehensive shader management solution that goes beyond just saving out preset values. The Sunday Warehouse system (which, SFAIK has now been discontinued) was really promising. Unfortunately these types of tools come and go and never really seem to get enough traction, probably because of low adoption. But if a similar tool were integrated into Vray then we could all rely on it sticking around.

[yolov]

The main point for us is that a) yes - the maya preset menu is for user presets and b) if we stick something there, it won't be obvious that we have presets.
I couldn't find anything for 'sunday warehouse' (at least not CG related ) so if you can get me a link or a way to know more about it, I'd like to explore what it does/did a bit.

[seandunderdale]

If you have maps plugged in, and then choose a preset, personally Id want a simple dialog box to ask if I wanted to keep current map inputs or not. I can think of both options being huge time savers.

[yolov]

I really dislike additional prompts / windows popping up
What about a 'reset' checkbox that if enabled will break all connections and reset all parameters when a new preset is chosen, but keep connections when unchecked if a new preset is chosen (and will also not reset the parameters that the preset does not affect)?
You would toggle the checkbox before choosing a preset.

[seandunderdale]

Good compromise : )

[SonyBoy]

Here's a couple of links for the Sunday stuff:

https://vimeo.com/27635338

https://lesterbanks.com/2011/08/maya...nday-pipeline/

It was basically just a shader and asset library and browser, but with shaders had the benefit of creating a thumbnail image for each one you could see before importing to your scene.