mayzie » Downloads

Maya + mental ray ArchViz Guide

Mayzie — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 11:51:55 +0000

I’m not normally one to use mental ray for a project these days, but I thought I should share this wonderful guide that Alex Sandri has put together through years of hard work and experiments.

400 pages of tutorials, instructions and more. For more information, visit Samui3d.com or Alex’s CGTalk thread.

Links

I’m not sure if the site is broken as it is not loading for me in Chrome or IE, so I’ll post the links to the book:

Samui3d.com

Paint Effects Foliage Brush Presets

Mayzie — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 05:05:54 +0000

Personally I prefer something like Onyx for modelling trees, but I have been playing with Paint Effects recently trying to get a handle on how all the settings fit together.

I thought I’d share some that turned out okay during my experiments.

Feel free to convert these to mesh for rendering and apply some custom shaders to suit your own scenes as these are only really preset “base” brushes.

Also feel free to use these presets in any production if you want, all I ask is a small credit if they ever do get used.

Instructions

To get these presets working, just place the mel files into your “maya\[version]\presets\attrPresets\brush” folder.

These Paint Effects presets will probably require Maya 2011 due to the new parameters introduced in 2011.

Another thing to note is that you might have to adjust these trees to fit your scene. To do this simply adjust the “Global Scale” parameter on the brush node to suit your own scene scale.

Downloads

All images are rendered as native Paint Effects in V-Ray for Maya 2011. There have been no special shaders assigned or special geometry conversion – just pure Paint Effects rendered in V-Ray with a basic sun + sky set-up. They’d probably look a better with proper 2-Sided leaf shaders on them, leaf textures and after a bit of tweaking etc…

Neat Tree - Small

Generic Tree - Medium

Pine Tree - Small

Street Tree - Medium

Basic Tree - Medium/Large

Palm Tree - Large

Again, these trees are probably best suited to background rather than “hero” trees.

As I mentioned earlier, dedicated tree generators like Onyx or X-Frog are probably best at more realistic and higher resolution models, but I think Paint Effects is not bad!

Credits

Credits go to Duncan Brimsmead for the basis of the Pine Tree model and Christian Stejnar for the basis of Palm Tree model.

V-Ray Support for LayoutTools 2011

Mayzie — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 03:10:02 +0000

I have updated Autodesk’s LayoutTools 2011 script to support the generation of thumbnails using V-Ray.

If you haven’t seen LayoutTools before, it is basically an invaluable tool from Autodesk’s Steven Roselle that does a great of organising your props and assets as thumbnails within the Maya UI (among other useful things).

Take a brief look at it here.

By default, LayoutTools only supports the Hardware Renderer, mental ray and Maya’s native Software Renderer to generate its thumbnails. To add V-Ray support, we have to replace some scripts with the ones in the zip file below.

Update (24th November 2010)

I have updated the script as I had found some errors with my original script.

If you have downloaded this script before the 24th of November 2010 I suggest to update as I have fixed the following.

When generating icons, Maya’s Render Window will no longer open upon every render
Defaulting to V-Ray “Adaptive DMC” instead of “Adaptive Subdivision”, so there should be a speed increase
Previously, the script would fail to render when a pre-existing “icons” folder was not found in the props directory
Lowered soft shadow sampling for faster icon generation
Made bucket size smaller for faster icon generation
A few other minor fixes

Instructions

First of all, make sure you have the latest version of LayoutTools and at least Maya 2011 Hotfix3 installed (otherwise things might be a little buggy)
Once you have LayoutTools installed, download the zip file below and extract all the files inside to where you have LayoutTools installed

Don’t worry about overwriting any files as I have included the original files in the zip file below, just in case you need them again

Download

V-Ray for Maya 2011 Icons

Mayzie — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:17:42 +0000

I’ve updated my old icons to work with Maya 2011. I originally made these icons to kind of “Mayafi” the standard icons that are installed with V-Ray, as the originals stood out too much for my liking.

Some are just reused mental ray icons, others are new. Just extract these png icons to your Maya icon directory (ie maya2011-x64/prefs/icons) if you want to use them.

Download

V-Ray for Maya Icons

Mayzie — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:07:46 +0000

So I made an attempt to “Mayafi” the standard V-Ray icons that are installed with V-Ray. It’s not that big a deal really, but the originals really stood out too much for my liking, so I went and changed them.

Some of them are the inspired by ripped off from the mental ray icons, others are new.

Just extract the icons to your Maya icon directory. (ie maya2010-x64/prefs/icons) or corresponding directory on your computer depending on Maya version.