Reference Workflow with Maya and duplicate material problem

[Filib]

Hello everyone,
im a design student from germany and got some experience in automotive and productdesign visualisation. Because of my internship i swapped from 3dsmax to maya and tried to improve my workflow. I got a lot of question, hopefully someone can help me out and help me to improve my skills in maya and Vray.
(Maya 2016 EXT 2 / Maya 2017 + Vray 3.4 latest)

0. general questions
-working with .mb or .ma? and why?

1. Working with reference files

->Mainscene.mb

->Reference File #1 (two spheres with two seperat materials plastic#1 and metal#1)

->Reference File #2 (two cylinder with two seperat materials plastic#1 and metal#1)

- should i the shade the reference files?
- or should i do the shading in the Mainscene and transfer those materials into the reference files?
- IMPORTANT: if i shaded the reference files and then load them inside of my mainscene, how can i to avoid duplicated materials (materials with the same name and same parameters)? i tried to config the reference settings to merge duplicate shading networks but i found no solution for this
- Proxy vs reference - or mix it up?

2. Working with passes

- how could i do object passes to have each object as a sperate mask
- are there some tutorials out there to see how to create a beauty pass with seperate lights on passes (Deep Render Element Composing)

3. Some troubleshootings

- avoid problems with the surface matte(Wrapper + Basemtl and all the important checkboxes ticked) if a dome is used
- using the new render setup is there a possibility to swap between cameras if i change the renderlayer?
- Anything like Forest Pack for Maya out there?
- how to see textures like soulburnscript for 3dsmax allows us (http://www.3dtotal.com/admin/new_cro..._tid_pic09.jpg)
- is there a good way to create a shaderlibrary with previews



Thank you for help and i hope some of you guys got time for me and my stuff
regards Filib

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Hello there,

Most of the questions you asked are actually Maya/pipeline specific and I won't be able to help with those.
It would be a good idea post them also on Autodesk community or to experiment a bit until you find the best workflow for you.

- Proxy vs reference - or mix it up?
It depends. The benefit of using V-Ray proxy objects is memory optimization during the rending, if you have enough memory to render the scenes you are working on it would be better to keep the geometry in the (reference)scene. Reference scenes also allows exporting other Maya setups like simulations,kinematics and etc so if you would like to export not only geometry information a reference scene would be a better choice.

- how could i do object passes to have each object as a sperate mask
V-Ray is equip with multiple tools for extracting object masks. The most famous one is probably MultiMatte render element. More information about each of the tools could be found here:
https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VRAY3MAYA/Matte+Elements

- are there some tutorials out there to see how to create a beauty pass with seperate lights on passes (Deep Render Element Composing)
There are a lot of compositing tutorials/topics here in the Forums and over the Internet, on the link bellow you will find a basic and advanced way to recreate the Beauty pass from render elements.
https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...%7C+RGB_Color+

- avoid problems with the surface matte(Wrapper + Basemtl and all the important checkboxes ticked) if a dome is used
What problems, can you show is some images,scenes,already discussed threads etc?

[TheScope]

0. general questions
-working with .mb or .ma? and why?

MB. Much smaller filesize and much faster loading. Just turn on Autosave and save in increments so you can go back to an older version if something breaks. While it is nice to be able to edit .ma files with a text editor, I hardly ever need to do it. If you still want the safety of .ma, you could store all files with heavy geometry as .mb (or .abc) and only the smaller files where everything is referenced as .ma.

1. Working with reference files

->Mainscene.mb

->Reference File #1 (two spheres with two seperat materials plastic#1 and metal#1)

->Reference File #2 (two cylinder with two seperat materials plastic#1 and metal#1)

If the shaders are supposed to be identical, I would create a 3rd maya file with the shaders, load that as a reference as well and then apply the shaders. You could store the different shader assignments in selection sets for easy access.

- is there a good way to create a shaderlibrary with previews

SLiB is pretty good for that.
http://store.cgfront.com/slib-plug-i...rpro-maya.html

Cheers, Florian

[Filib]

@thescope

Thank you for the answer. i wrote you a pn did you receive any message from my side? You work with maya right?