Maya tri-planar to work like Max's

[seandunderdale]

Is it possible to have the Maya workflow behave the same as Max's in terms of the tri-planar node? When using Quixel and settings up shaders with displacement, reflection, albedo, normals etc is becomes extremely tedious making loads of tri-planar nodes, then setting one to be the control master of that shader by manually connecting up all the inputs you might want to use and be consistent....size, blend, rotations, offsets. Then build all of that per shader...over a scene that has lots of rock, sand, grass etc it can add up to be so much time just setting tri-planar values. And then you have the issue of missing off a connection, and your render looking odd, and having to go and find which tri-planar in all of the network has a wrong value.

In max, one tri-planar plugs into all the file textures in a network, so when you change one value it all pipes downstream. It seems like such a better way to work.

I get that its this way probably because of how Maya is, but is there a way to update the tri-planar so we can connect multiple maps into one node? So we can still control multiple maps with one tri-planar, but not have to manually connect up every attribute to every tri-planar in that network.

[SonyBoy]

I've noticed from watching a lot of Grant Warwick's old Vray training material -- and from limited time spent working with Max -- that instancing in shading networks is much easier and user friendly than it is in Maya, which has no equivalent really (other than "duplicate with network connections"). I agree that something like this would be highly useful instead of having to spend endless time in the connection editor.

If it's a workflow you use a lot though, consider building a reusable empty template scene with connections already made that you can just import when you need this kind of thing. You could, theoretically, even build in a master control null with your driver attributes on it so that you wouldn't even have to keep track of which one is your "master" triplanar node.

Or you could write a simple script to make connections between two selected triplanar nodes for quicker setup in each scene.

[vladimir_krastev]

Hi, thanks for posting. What if you use the Attribute Spread Sheet? You can select the VRayTriplanar nodes you want to adjust and do it for all at once. Or probably you have something else in mind?

[seandunderdale]

Thanks for the reply and example. It does work, as a workaround, but again, requires making multiple selections, not missing any in a complex network. The MAX setup is elegant and simplistic, and achieves the result with minimal human error possibilities. If its not possible to mimic the same way it works, one collective node to control a group of file textures, thats fine. ( And I am aware of the possibitly to connect up one tri planer to control others, as mentioned in my post, but again, it introduces human error, and its time consuming for those of us who dont yet know scripting). Ill just accept Maya has an inferior workflow to MAX in this regard.

[vladimir_krastev]

Hi, we logged an issue about this improvement in our system under VMAYA-12191. Thanks for reporting.