MAYA Snow texture isn't rendering with Vray GPU and isn't baking with Vray

[kremiansky]

Maya Snow is a texture which allows to procedurally mix two textures by angle (and even recognizes bump and normal, which is super nice) , so essentially super useful for snow, moss, and dust- and it's not rendering with Vray GPU, not can be baked with vray baking.
However it renders just fine with Vray CPU.

Maya 17, latest Vray version, pretty sure it was possible to bake it in previous versions in maya 16 (and it did take normal and bump into account).
Can you guys please fix it?

[yolov]

The GPU is supposed to bake it automatically, since it doesn't support this as a procedural texture, but I can confirm that it doesn't work as expected. I'll make a note for the devs, thanks for the report.

[kremiansky]

Thank you, hope it will be resolved soon!
Just making sure- when I said bake I meant to bake it as to a texture in order to edit it externally, and not just for render.

[yolov]

Yes, I understand that. I also spoke with the devs, the snow texture is not supported on the GPU at the moment and it will not produce meaningful results on the GPU, unfortunately. You can try baking it with the CPU and then use it with the GPU, or you can use something else instead, depending on what you're trying to achieve with it. Can you tell us more about the use case?
It is added to our to-do list, but we can't say when we'll get to it.

[kremiansky]

So I tried having a vray material with a normal map and black and white snow in the diffuse, which renders fine in the VFB but as soon I try and assign a baking node to it and render it to texture I don't get a good result.
The use case?
I have a few projects I'm working on, some of them have snow, some of them have dust/dirt and some of them have moss/"grass" (for distant stuff) which are being either mixed in the diffuse channel by the said snow texture, or being mixed in Blend material using snow as an alpha.

If there won't be a solution for maya snow in the future, I would recommend maybe creating a Vray Slope texture with similar options- amount, sharpness, etc.

*** the most useful thing about this texture is that it recognizes normal map/bump, and not just the surface's slope

[yolov]

Are you trying to bake the snow texture with the GPU or the CPU? It should work fine on the CPU.