v-ray ready models for Maya???

[Richard7666]

Are there any libraries out there of V-ray ready models for Maya? Furniture, plants, cars and the like.

Evermotion did a few but they are of very old collections so look fairly crap.

[snivlem]

YOu said it. Apart from maybe a couple on turbosquid or highend3d or whatever they call it these days and the three or so evermotion - but there is nothing my Friend. 3DS Max only.

I use polytrans to go from Sketchup to Maya, 3ds max to maya so usually I only have to setup materials.

polytrans beats the snot out of Autodesk's crap FBX tech. Bit expensive though.

[Richard7666]

Yeah it's recreating the materials that is a pain. I wonder if model creators will update their models to support 3.0s new Vismats. Then you'd only need to import the model and import the Vismats, instead of having to recreate the shader networks from scratch.

I might email Evermotion and ask.

[m0dus]

If you have the time you could script it: the vrscene export works surprisingly well. At the moment i've managed to script an almost fully automated work flow to convert max files to maya, including vray materials. The only drawback for now is that 2sided materials are not (really) supported and displacements are ignored (but that's more or less logical), but in general it works great (for instance i recently converted some, 40 or so, design connected models to maya in 5 minutes, without any errors).

[snivlem]

^ You tease us!

Does your method end up with the BRDF plugin material or the actual VRayMtl?

In my workflow I just have an extra step built onto the mesh importer which converts all the phong materials to VRayMtl. Textures etc... always come in fine. But I just have to manually assign presets to some shaders (blank, plastic gloss, metal etc...) Usually doesn't take very long to do.

http://www.dryzen.com/scripts_mia2vray.html

[m0dus]

Actual VRayMtls and VrayBlendMtls (altough this required some extra scripting, which is not tested on a very difficult blend material, and based on some assumptions). The materials are an exact match (for what I've encountered so far) to those used in max, so including bump size, gloss, samples etc.. If you trying export to a vrscene using vray rt you end up indeed with the plugin materials, which basically sucks (no pun intended ), and the demo has a limit of 5 exports if i recall correctly, so for the bulk stuff thats not workable. Exporting while in the viewport doesn't have these limitations and you end up with a nice material (in general). What i did is automated this proces: in max a scripts reads out a folder and converts all the files to a fbx and a vrscene file which are put back together in maya.

[Richard7666]

How do you handle situations that use Max-only nodes?

Evermotion have a habit of using Max's falloff map for controlling reflection angles. They also use a lot of blend materials.

If it works for Designconnected models though your method sounds promising! I'm a scripting noob sadly
Would you be willing to share your script?

[m0dus]

I'll have to test that. From what i can recall i got some funky nodes in Maya, but i don't know if they are working alright (i don't use archmodels that often). At the moment the script writes some text files with possible errors so I know which files to check, this wouldn't be too difficult to do with a fall off like node. The typical evermotion blend material works fine at the moment, although that took some time to figure out.

I consider(ed) myself a scripting noob also, but this type of scripting is no rocket science . I'll have to think about sharing, first I've to do some optimizations and build a ui in order to have something decent.

[seq]

Sounds great, m0dus! If you decide to share it, we would be very interested and would be willing to pay for it.

[Richard7666]

I got a reply from Evermotion, they said they're looking into it once V-ray for Maya 3.0 is released with its Vismat support.

[m0dus]

Looking forward to that feature too. Don't know when we can expect something like that though.

In the mean time I did a conversion on the latest archmodels with cars and that worked great (47 out of 50 without an error), but their latest tree pack is one big misery (although still faster than using the fbxs/objs and building your own (nice looking) materials). I think the problem is at the max side (let's say me lack of knowledge on that side). Perhaps there's someone over here with some decent maxscript knowledge so we can help each other out?

[bazuka]

i have a will, but not the permission to share anything, most of the think i own (models, of course legally) r converted to maya format with shaders...

like i did with shaders from vray-materials.de

i could speak with guys from Evermotion and see if we could come up with some cooperation/deal for everyone

cheers

[Richard7666]

That would be amazing. You're pretty much the conversion master! V-ray for Maya has grown very popular in the last two years but the asset libraries don't reflect that (though somewhat because the Max market is more freelancer/vis oriented)

I've converted some of their trees.