Rendering normal maps in Maya...how?

[TWilson]

Can anyone recommend a good tutorial on rendering normal maps in Maya? By that I mean in mental ray or vray or any sexy renderer.

Tired of printscreen.

Cheers

T

[IxenonI]

Use a shader of your choice like a blinn or a phong shader. Add the normal map in the bump map channel setting it to tangent space normal. Place your lights, set your renderer to mental ray and render away /images/graemlins/wink.gif

Dont forget, for mirrowed normals you have to flip the coresponding color channels in Photoshop so that the mirrored parts show up right in the rendering.

Vray is not available in Maya, another solution would be to use the hardware Renderer to get an exact Rendering of what you see in your Viewport set to High Quality Rendering (Beware: Problems with shadows etc)

[TWilson]

I'm quite pleased that works. Thanks!

I was under the impression Vray was in beta testing for maya or something. I'm fluent in 3dsmaxanese too so I can use it there I suppose.

While I'm here do you know of any good metal ray type info spots? rtfm?

[Ape.of.Gods]

Yeah it's in testing for Maya, but works really differently from the Max version.

The last time I tried the beta it didn't work well for baking either, but that was a while ago.

[rebb]

Is Finalrender of Maya out already ? They took their sweet time being in Beta for it too.

[IxenonI]

@rebb: Yeah its already out. http://www.cebas.com/index.php?UD=10-7888-35-788

@TWilson: What do you want to know about the materials? The shaders work basically just the same way as in any other 3d app. I suggest just playing around with it. Try the CGtalk Maya Mental Ray Section for tutorials and general Information