General pipeline questions - custom attributes

V-Ray for Maya V-Ray for Maya :: General
1

Hi everyone,

I’m working in the studio which is supporting clients from automotive sector - and that means handling and processing a lot of incomming and outgoing data. Pipeline in our branch is maya/vray based. So far everything worked less or more painful with help of our custom written tools to handle repetative tasks. After years in production our current and past projects grow to the enormous sizes which forces us to change the direction for the whole 3d pipeline. Mainly because of all sort of kind limitations like for ex. scene loading times, mess in the file structure, scrambled geo data, etc. That leads us to the point when we start to lose control over the requested by client quality. That’s just a snippet of a bigger picture.

So before someone decide to reinvent the wheel we’re still obligated to keep our pipeline alive because of dozens of business agreements.

Anyway, I’m not giving up our old pipeline and for that I have few questions I’d like to ask you dear ChaosGroup team.

1. I’m curious if it’s possible to connect custom attribute on a shape node with a shader stored in referenced material library? For ex. custom attr with “gold” value will fetch “gold” shader stored in shader repository at render time. I’m interested in passing whole set of shader attributes and not only a color.
2. Are you planning to expand amount of slots in VRaySwitchMtl node?
3. Are you planning to support Pixars USD?

Thank you,
S

2

Hi,

1) You can do this easily with Python scene access of VRay.
3) USD is just a scene description. Maya has to handle it, not really VRay

3

How many do you need?

4

For sure more than 10 :slight_smile: It’s all dependent on clients requests and countless product updates. It’ll be great to have a flexible way of adding the next item on the list.

Can you please share a little example BigBossFr? What I have so far is some simple solution which is basically narrowed to assigning shaders per object name - not per stored in shape node user attributes (in Pre and Post render MEL).

5

Create an attribute on a shape, like “vrayShader”, type string.
Add you shader name.
In python scene access (please check the help : Chaos Docs ), you get the material name from your attribute and you export it using exportMaterial function.
After you select all plugin type Node using findByType. After you assign the material to the material attribute of your plugin.