Vray curvature texture in maya (concave/convex)?

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

Hi, is there a vray texture or plugin (or maya node) that can create convexity/concavity textures like the tension modifier in 3ds max?

2

Have you tried VrayDirt ?

3

Yes i use vray dirt for most things (cavities, drips, etc) however it doesn’t seem to work in certain instances- for example if you want an object that has been scratched along its curved/ convex edges, vray dirt doesn’t seem to work correctly when used in the bump slot. The tension modifier gives you a nice useable (vertex colour map) texture so you can quickly get access to the concave/convex areas, saving a lot of time with Uving and texture painting.

4

Here’s the mental ray version:
ttp://www.tomcowland.com/mentalray/tc_curvature/
not sure if this might work with vray but i’ll give it a try

5

Tc curvature doesn’t work unless you use mental ray as your renderer.
Is anyone using an alternative in maya/vray/osx?

6

while my suggestion is not a replacement to tc_curvature, what I do to get the edges like that (marked in red) is invert the color of occlusion, and also check invert normals, this will trace rays inwards and detect the closest points, works well if you want to capture concave/convex detail.

7

It looks like it should be fairly easy to write a V-Ray version of the tc shader - it has its sources included. I will see if one of our guys can do it.

Best regards,
Vlado

8

Wow great thanks!!!

Yes I also use vray dirt and it does a great job in a lot of instances but a curvature based solution means you can quickly apply effects to the edges of complex objects with one node… ie for example an ornate object scratched on the areas which point out, or dust/moss gathering in concave areas. The result is slightly different to occlusion and the combination of both means you can cover most bases…

9

Hi all,
I’ve created a similar texture to the one you mentioned above.
It doesn’t have all the options for the sake of simplicity, but check it out and let me know if that’s working for you. F.e. only convex curvatures are rendered as concave is only useful with NURBS (as mentioned in the above site).
All in all, you got 3 params:
- subdivs: number of samples (subdivs*subdivs)
- spread: radius of the area you will sample
- convex max: upper limit for the mapping of the result (which is the average angle of all sampled normals): curvature gets mapped [0..convex_max] --> [0..1]

Files attached in the form of dynamic shading node. In case you don’t know to to install it: just put AEvrayCurvatureTemplate.mel in the ‘scripts’ dir, TexCurvature.dll in ‘vrayplugins’ and desc.txt in ‘shaders’ (NOTE: if you have your custom desc.txt take care not to replace it with mine, but just copy/paste the TexCurature {} portion of mine, which is at the of the file).

Best,
Emil
tex_curvature.zip (51.6 KB)

10

Wow sounds perfect! Am on hols at the moment but as soon as im backing looking forward to giving this a try!

11

Please port also to max.

The interface which can read vrayplugins directly also to max early!

12

Hi

Apologies it took me so long to try this out. The plugin crashes when invoked directly from the hypershade. I cant see it in the list of vray import plugins. The vray plugins i have (in the vrayplugins folder in applications/autodesk etc) are of the format ‘.so’ rather than ‘.dll’ : is this a mac/windows thing? I am on a mac.

thanks

13

Yeah, that’s because this plugin was build for Windows only (dll’s are dynamic libraries that run on Windows). I’ll make a version for the Mac and upload it here.

14

And here it is.
tex_curvature_mac.zip (55.3 KB)

15

great stuff thanks!

16

Hi Emil

Sorry about this- unfortunately it still crashes maya upon opening. I’m using 2013, snowleapord.

thanks

17

Hm, I tested it on maya 2014 only. Will try with 2013 as well.

18

I don’t know if this is still relevant, but I should clarify that this plugin works on vray3 only (maya2013 including).
Do you still need it (and are you using vray2.x)?

19

Yes i would love to try it… unfortunately i am using vray 3.0 build 24501 and it crashes upon loading from the import plugin textures dialogue

20

Sorry, I should have clarified how to install it.
Well, you don’t import it from the “import plugin textures dialogue”, here’s how to “install” (it’s kind of manual, but since this is not in the official build yet…:)):
1) copy AEvrayCurvatureTemplate.mel to /Applications/Autodesk/maya2013/vray/scripts
2) copy desc.txt (backup yours first) to /Applications/Autodesk/maya2013/vray/shaders
3) copy libvray_TexCurvature.so to /Applications/Autodesk/maya2013/vray/vrayplugins

Now in maya, in hypershade, under utilities you should see vray_Curvature.

Let me know if that works for you.