Import .mat material in Maya - how to without 3DS Max?

[Irongraft]

Hi Guys.
I've downloaded the attached free material from www.vray-materials.de
Probably, this is a 3DS Max material which I'm not able to import in Maya.
Is there a method to convert it for Maya without using 3DS MAX?

Thanks

[joconnell]

No there isn't but judging by the filename it won't be hard to replicate. Water is the same as glass in that the material is very easy to make - very very dark blue for the diffuse, full reflection strength, maybe a tiny bit of glossiness (about .97) but most importantly..... shiny or reflective objects look like nothing if they don't have anything interesting to reflect. As an example, a mirror is supposed to reflect 100% of whatever it "sees" in front of it so if you put it in a 100% white room, it'd reflect only white and look like a white rectangle - pretty boring eh? It's the same thing with water too - the water itself looks pretty uninteresting until you give it an environment map or a sky to reflect. If you're doing wide ocean water for starters I'd get the demo of phoenix for maya, the only reason being to ensure you've got the phoenix ocean texture map which you can put into a vray displacement modifier on to a plane which sorts out the shape of the water geo for you. Now make either a vray sun / sky system and place the sunlight so it's visible in shot and you'll get something decent to render.

The material is really simple, there's no trick to it, it's all in what the sea is able to reflect.

[Irongraft]

Hey, thank you for your quick reply. It's clear!

I am trying to make a human cell where I'd like to make its outer membrane as a sort of jelly like (soft body?) Surface with some displacement and some foam (like small soap bubbles) somewhere. That shader was ocean and foam together. But maybe would be better to make foam procedurally? No idea how to proceed.

Moreover, I've thought to soft body for the outer membrane since I'd like to make the cell replicate inside this membrane that hence should stretch to contain both

I'm inspired by this amazing video. Unreachable for me. Look at where the green cell divide.

http://www.nymus3d.nl/portfolio/animation/150

Thanks for any suggestion
Tom

[joconnell]

Give this tutorial a run through, it's max based but the ideas translate. Where it mentions a fallof texture, use the vray fake fresnel in maya instead.

http://neilblevins.com/cg_education/...ts_falloff.htm

For wet looking materials like the outer surface of that cell division, it'll just be some bumps / displaces on the outer surface which will make it break up the reflections in interesting ways and then just use a slightly glossy reflection - 0.95 ish. Again just give it something interesting to reflect - since the surfaces you'll be doing are so round and distorted you can use any kind of hdr you want.

[Irongraft]

Ok thanks I'm going through the tutorial.
For the outer surface, what the about soft-body ?

Thanks

[joconnell]

Just depends on if you want to animate it or not, that stuff is normally done with meta particles or some kind of blob mesh. Vray comes with a meta ball object which might let you pick a few mesh objects to make a continuous surface over, thinkbox's frost will do it too. modelling is kind of program specific and I'm not a day to day maya user unfortunately!