Deep OpenEXR files allow to store a variable number of samples per pixel at different depth locations to aid advanced depth compositing workflows.

To render a Deep OpenEXR file with mental ray, open the Render Settings dialog and make sure that the image output format is set to “exr” in the Common tab:

In the Scene tab, enable the “Use Deep Image format” checkbox:

The  Deep OpenEXR file is written in multi-part, which means that files can contain a number of separate but related images. Each render pass gets its own part (i. e. direct_diffuse, indirect_diffuse).

In order to save memory during rendering, mental ray creates tiled Deep OpenEXR files. These files need to be converted to scanline for use in compositing applications like Nuke. This conversion can be performed using imf_copy, a command line tool that is part of your mental ray for Maya installation. It can be found in the bin directory. Call

imf_copy -s tiled-exr-file.exr scanline-exr-file.exr

to perform the conversion. Click on the image below to see a screenshot of the tool executed on a Windows system:

Please note that currently only z front is supported. This means that rendering deep volumes is not possible yet. Deep and flat data cannot be mixed in the same OpenEXR file.

In Maya 2016 we are introducing basic support for loading and rendering MDL materials with mental ray. In this post we want to take a closer look at how these materials can be used in Maya. For a general introduction to MDL in mental ray, check out this post.

The MDL Node

In Maya, MDL materials are represented by a new surface shader node called mdl_material, which is located in the mental ray surface material section of the “Create Material” window or “Hypershade”.

When you assign an mdl_material to an object, you will see that it contains two drop down lists: One for choosing an MDL module and another one for choosing an MDL material:

An MDL module is a file which can contain one or more MDL materials and has a “.mdl” extension. By default, mental ray for Maya 2016 ships only one module, that contains the default_material, a light grey diffuse. Because of that, both drop down lists contain just one entry.

To populate the lists you will need more materials. In the next section, we will see how to get some.

Adding MDL materials

As already announced in the MDL introduction post, example materials can be downloaded here.

1) Unzip the archive to a temporary directory.

By default, mental ray for Maya uses one root directory for placing MDL modules, the directory shaders/mdl within your mentalrayForMaya2016 installation.

2) Copy the folder mdl_examples_for_maya_3dsmax into the MDL root directory as shown below:

If you do not have write permissions in the Program Files directory or would generally prefer another location, you can define additional MDL root directories by specifying the MI_MDL_PATH. To do so, open the Maya.env file, which can be found in the Maya 2016 user directory:

Add the line

MI_MDL_PATH=<Path to MDL files>

If you, for example, make an MDL root directory called “mdl” in your Maya/2016 user directory, as shown in the screenshot above, your MI_MDL_PATH path needs to look like

MI_MDL_PATH=C:\users\<USERNAME>\Documents\Maya\2016\mdl

More than one path can be specified, separated by a “;”.

A note on packages

In most cases, MDL modules are organized into packages, just like our example package. On disk, a package corresponds to a directory. The name of the package is the name of the directory. Packages can be nested to organize complex libraries. Within a package, modules can reference each other and contained resources (like textures) relative to each other or the package root directory. Because of this, it is important to always retain the package structure. Never just copy single mdl files or subdirectories out of a package into your MDL root directory, always use the full package, including the root folder.

Rendering MDL materials with mental ray for Maya

Now that our example package has been put into place, start Maya. Create an object and assign a mdl_material to it. The MDL Module drop down list should look like this:

When you choose a module, the material drop down list will be populated with the materials contained in the selected module, and the first material will automatically be selected. The “MDL Material Parameters” section shows the parameters of that material, which you can modify to your liking.

Other MDL materials, focused on requirements from the automotive industry are available for download in the Advanced Rendering Forum.

Limitations

MDL materials are closed entities. They cannot be used in a shading network. Even though Maya allows connections to traditional shader and utility nodes, mental ray will ignore these  connections. However, MDL materials can be used alongside with traditional materials and shaders.

In its initial state, the mdl_material node does not come with a swatch render, has no viewport representation and is also not supposed to work with IPR. These limitations will be removed in future releases.

This is the first in a series of posts on mental ray for Maya 2016 Render Settings

Introduction

We significantly changed the mental ray for Maya 2016 Render Settings User Interface (UI) in order to reduce time spent adjusting renders. The defaults aim for no-fuss rendering of the most frequently used and up-to-date features. Of specific note, our newest Global Illumination (GI) mode significantly increases ease-of-use and productivity.

We provide almost everything a user needs here within this UI. For example, a user should not have to type in string options anymore.

Goals

Members of both NVIDIA ARC and Autodesk, including UI designers and developers, collaborated to make this change significant. As stated in the Maya 2016 documentation for mental ray Render Settings, we aim to:

• Enable complete rendering without requirement to adjust or enable most settings. The defaults should enable the most frequently used features.
• Increase ease-of-use when adjusting settings to control for optimization and quality.
• Provide single global controls to reduce repetitive and potentially error-inducing settings across scene elements.

We also want to retain the flexibility of mental ray for production users. So we provide an Advanced Settings option on each of the new tabs. We hide less frequently used features in favor of a cleaner, more productive and simpler control for basic workflow. This leads users of all levels to what is fundamentally important to control.

Render Settings Tabs

We re-organized the mental ray Render Settings into four main tabs:

The Quality tab contains quality settings for controlling sampling. By using quality settings, instead of sample counts, we take advantage of better optimization schemes internally. We also believe it will be conceptually easier, once the community gets familiar with this style of control.

The Scene tab contains shared settings across scene elements, such as camera settings that should be applied to all renderable cameras. This is where we provide the new simplified mental ray Passes.

The Configuration tab contains settings that are more likely to be used across Maya sessions, and how a user likes to work with the scene. For example, the interactive rendering control for progressive rendering depends on a machine’s resources.

The Diagnostics tab contains settings that help a user with problem solving, or identification of areas for optimization.

Quality Settings

Here, we provide an overview of how to adjust your scenes with the new UI, suggesting our recommended practice.

For new scenes, use the Overall Quality setting in the Sampling section as the primary control for speed vs. quality. It is located at the top of the Quality tab.This controls samples across a scene. Samples are not fixed per pixel. Rather, they vary in density per pixel region. More samples are taken in each region until the quality is matched.

In the next section, we provide detail to better understand how to adjust quality beyond the Overall Quality setting. With better understanding, we hope you can more quickly achieve your desired results. 

Understanding more about quality adjustment

Here, we introduce the concept of global vs. local sampling. This concept is key to adjusting quality now and in the future, as rendering technology evolves.

The Overall Quality setting is a global setting that controls samples across a scene. Each sample starts a ray traced from the camera out into the scene. In essence, we sample the scene from the eye (E). Below, we show an eye ray (in green) over a work by Albrecht Dürer.

When an eye ray intersects an object, the eye ray may split into several samples. We will call those the local samples, in contrast to the global samples, because they are local to each eye ray. Below, we show a diffuse distribution of local samples split out for diffuse reflection.

We separate the local samples into two categories at an intersection point: the samples used for lights and the samples used for materials.

For materials, the sample directions depend on the type of surface at the intersection point. For example, above a diffuse surface creates samples in the hemisphere above the intersection point. Because these samples tend to hit objects, it represents indirect light.

For lighting, the samples are taken from all visible lights in the scene. Below, we see a single light sample for the same intersection point. There could be more light samples depending on number and size of lights. Light samples represent direct light.

Traditionally, lights were only those elements specified explicitly as lights in the scene, and they had no size. However, as rendering implementations evolved, so did lights, from point to area lights, and now, emissive objects. Also, consider the light from an environment. Environments convert automatically into light sources by enabling environment light emission. When enabled, we provide a separate quality control for the environment lighting.Note that it is grayed out when not enabled. Furthermore, now one can create such a light more directly. See for example Create > Lights > Environment Image (IBL).

Similarly, we provide a separate control for indirect diffuse (GI) quality in materials, even though it is conceptually a part of material quality.As global illumination techniques have evolved considerably, so have the ways to control these techniques. Yet, the Indirect Diffuse Quality applies to any Indirect Diffuse (GI) Mode selected, and to any material used.

In our next mental ray for Maya 2016 Render Settings post, we provide more details and examples for Adjusting Quality.

In this post, we introduce the newest features of the mental ray for Maya 2016 plugin that is delivered with Autodesk Maya 2016 and can be downloaded here. Stay tuned for more in-depth posts on the features.

Render Settings Redesign

This version comes with a complete new layout of the Render Settings. Our goal is to make the rendering experience with mental ray straight forward and easy. Settings are greatly simplified and grouped together. Five tabs allow to find settings sorted by topic. For advanced users, each tab provides the ‘Advanced Settings’ mode with more detailed controls to fine-tune the rendering.

The Scene tab contains a simplified render passes system for standard utility passes

as well as MILA Light Path and Matte Pass passes.

A more throrough introduction to the new Render Settings will follow shortly.

NVIDIA Material Definition Language

mental ray 3.13 renders materials defined by the NVIDIA Material Definition Language (MDL). MDL is an NVIDIA initiative to standardize physically based material designs in a common format, see http://www.nvidia.com/MDL. Prepackaged MDL materials can be applied in mental ray for Maya 2016. We will provide you with an introduction on how to use MDL in Maya 2016 and with examples for download in this blog soon.

Light Importance Sampling By Default

Light Importance Sampling is now enabled by default. It gives a significant speed / quality advantage out of the box especially with modern and complex lighting setups, emissive objects, and very many light sources. In addition, new heuristics have been incorporated that automatically determine which light sources in the scene are physically plausible and would benefit from importance sampling. This way, traditional idealized light sources and simple lighting setups can be detected and handled separately, like they may be excluded from importance sampling to retain an overall benefit even though this feature is generally enabled. Custom light shaders are fully supported and will be included in importance sampling if they adhere to physically plausible emission and distribution rules.

Deep OpenEXR

mental ray 3.13 adds support for generating ‘deep’ data and output to OpenEXR files. The resulting image is saved in the DeepTile form of the OpenEXR 2.0 file format, storing additional information of the pixel colors along the Z axis. It is possible to save deep and simple 2D data into different frame buffers during the same rendering.

UV Tiles Optimized

Rendering UV-tiled textures is faster and more memory efficient in this version because it is based on a native mental ray shader. It auto-creates and loads the tile textures into mental ray on demand, making sure that only those tiles that are actually accessed get loaded into memory. The shader is part of a new package called coreutil, which collects essential mental ray utilities and helper functions.

Create Lights menu 

There is a new section in the Create|Lights menu for mental ray lights showing modern mental ray lights in a prominent and easily accessible place.

Object Lights

Using custom geometry to light your scene is now possible with mental ray for Maya 2016. You can assign the new ‘Object Light’ material to your geometry or, with the geometry selected, you can choose ‘Object Light’ from the new mental ray section in the Create|Lights menu. This will turn your geometry into a light.

                           Light bulb model courtesy of David Hackett.

Rendering Bifrost with mental ray

Bifröst is a procedural framework that can create simulated effects ranging from liquid to foam, bubbles, spray and mist. These effects can be rendered using the bifrost geometry shader delivered with mental ray for Maya 2016.

Autodesk published videos on bifrost and showing mental ray rendering at the end of each:

Maya 2016: Adaptive Aero Solver in Bifrost
Maya 2016: Guided Simulations in Bifrost
Maya 2016: Adaptive Foam in Bifrost

XGen hair shading and displacement

Rendering XGen with mental ray has been improved and enhanced with new features.

The default XGen hair shader for mental ray is now xgen_hair_physical. It is based on the mental ray human hair shader mib_illum_hair_x which has been improved with mental ray 3.13. It now adds contributions from indirect lighting to the shading. New parameters have been added to tune the tube shading look and to control the internal color noise effect.

Displacing sphere and dart primitives is now possible allowing for a much wider use-case for these primitives.

Texture Filtering based on Ray-Differentials

For advanced ‘elliptical’ texture filtering in Maya’s file node, we are now using ray differentials provided by mental ray core. This introduces more accurate and artifact-free texture filtering even across ray traced reflections and refractions.
To enable it, select a file node, choose ‘Mipmap’ as filtertype, go to the mental ray section and enable ‘Elliptical filtering’. You can choose between ‘Bilinear’ or ‘Bicubic’ filter mode.

Today we want to talk about how to use a custom hair shader to render XGen hair in mental ray for Maya. We will see how such a shader can be assigned, how various helper nodes can be used to alter the appearance of the hair and finally, we will make use of Disney’s expression language SeExpr() to create some interesting effects. For this purpose we use this little doll with a simple XGen hair cut:

By default, XGen uses the xgen_hair_phen shader. This shader mimics the appearance of hair by using a classical Phong model with 2 specular lobes. The shader’s diffuse color parameter can be fed by the custom XGen shader parameters root_color and tip_color. Those need to be defined in the “XGen Window” and allow us to make use of SeExpr(). We won’t go into details on xgen_hair_phen here but simply link to a good overview of all its parameters and an interesting tutorial on how to use it instead.

We start by assigning a different hair shader. For this, we select the XGen hair collection node in the “Outliner”, then choose “Assign New Material” under the “Lighting/Shading” menu and finally apply mib_illum_hair_x:

After some parameter tweaking, we end up with the following rendering:

Let’s add some root-to-tip color variation. In “Hypershade”, we create an xgen_root_tip_color_blend node and feed it into both the diffuse and the secondary color slots of the mib_illum_hair_x shader. The shader provides two color inputs which are blended together over the length of the hair. We choose the root color to be the same we had in mib_illum_hair_x before and orange for the tip:

To get some color variation not only along the length of the hair but also across the head, we now apply a texture to the root_color by connecting an xgen_ptex_lookup. We load the XGen region map for want of a better texture. Here is the result:

So far so good. But still no expressions involved.

In the “Output/Preview” section of the “XGen Window”, we add a new parameter of type color and name it custom_color (any name will do here):

The custom_color parameter appears in the UI but it does not look like a color yet. The little icon next to the new parameter will bring up the “Expression Editor”. We open it and type in the expression seen below to make it a color (red, for now):

Now let’s connect this newly created variable to our shading network. We create a xgen_seexpr node and connect it to  the tip_color input of the xgen_root_tip_color_blend shader:

To make use of our custom_color parameter in the xgen_seexpr shader, we then type its name in the shader’s Customs attribute and type the expression $custom_color; into the Expression field:

The rendering shows that the custom_color parameter has been picked up correctly:

Finally, lets replace this simple color by a more complex expression. XGen provides quite a long list of expression samples which can be accessed as shown in the image below. From the “Color” subset we choose “NoiseC”.

A bunch of new parameters will be added below our custom_shader parameters, Those parameters define the noise function we just selected. Instead of modifying them directly in the XGen window, let’s open the expression editor for immediate visual feedback. After some value tuning we get a quite colorful map:

And here the rendering we get out of this:

We could alter the expression to change the look even further, we could create more custom parameters and combine them in the xgen_seexpr shader, the possibilities are endless, so we simply leave further experiments to you and your imagination!