MayaMan Help Contents

# MayaMan Features

MayaMan translates your Maya scene into RenderMan RIB format, and your materials into RenderMan shaders. It is difficult for MayaMan to support every single Maya feature, so this page outlines which aspects of your Maya scenes will be correctly translated to your RenderMan renderers, and also some general features of the MayaMan plugin.

## General MayaMan Features

- MayaMan is a fully integrated Maya plugin, which uses MEL for its interface and Maya attributes for data storage. This means MayaMan is fully scriptable and can be interfaced with other Maya tools. It is not a closed 'black box' like some other tools. MayaMan's attributes can be animated or driven by expressions just like any normal Maya attributes.

- MayaMan can output to many different RenderMan renderers, so it is not tied to any particular rendering product. There are many exciting new RenderMan renderers currently in development, and MayaMan should support any popular products in the future.

- Maya materials are emulated through the Maya 'Magic Shaders' mechanism, which writes custom RenderMan shaders on-the-fly to emulate your Maya material hierarchies. Alternatively you can attach custom RenderMan shaders for surfaces, displacements, volume or lights. Custom shader parameters can be driven by Maya animation or expressions.

- A variety of RIB formatting styles are supported, from a single flat RIB file to the creation of well structured, efficient RIB files, taking full advantage of DelayedReadArchive. Separate 'qual' files can be generated to facilitate changing the quality parameters without needing to regenerate entire RIB file sequences.

- Facility for substituting scene geometry with ReadArchive RIB files or RunProcedural applications.

- Advanced renderer features such as Global Illumination supported.

## Supported Maya Geometry

- NURBS surfaces

- Polygon meshes

- Particles - currently points, spheres, blobbies and sprites. The other types will also be supported soon. Basic geometry instantiation supported, support for finer controls to come.

- Curve primitives. You can render Maya curves as RiCurve primitives, including specifying curve width and materials.

- Subdivision meshes. Normal polygonal geometry can be rendered as subdiv surfaces, even without owning a Maya Unlimited license.

## Supported Maya HyperGraph Nodes

Most materials you create in Maya's Hypershade editor will be translated into RenderMan shaders and the result should be quite close to the Maya render of that material. The following Hypershade nodes are supported:

- phong, phongE, blinn, surfaceShader, lambert, anisotropic, layeredShader, displacementShader, particleCloud, shadingMap, spotLight, wood, file, place2dTexture, place3dTexture, checker, ramp, fractal, noise, bump2d, bump3d, projection, clamp, multiplyDivide, surfaceLuminance, blendColors, envBall, envChrome, envSphere, envCube, marble, leather, granite, rock, luminance, rgbToHsv, hsvToRgb, contrast, gammaCorrect, bulge, condition, plusMinusAverage, reverse, setRange, stencil, vectorProduct, grid, mountain, snow, water, cloth, crater, stucco, brownian, solidFractal, cloud, samplerInfo, tripleShadingSwitch, doubleShadingSwitch, singleShadingSwitch, volumeNoise, envFog, lightFog, layeredTexture

People with home-grown hypergraph nodes can add them into the shader generation engine by studying and extending the maya_texture_description, maya_material_description and maya_magic_shaders.h files. See Extending the MayaMan Magic Shaders Support

The most up-to-date list of supported nodes can be found in the MAYAMANROOT/shaders/maya_texture_description file. Any nodes listed in that file should be giving the correct results.

NB: actually, only the main parameters of most of these nodes are supported, as time goes by the support for them will be refined based on user feedback.

## Other Supported Maya Features

- Motion Blur
- Depth of Field
- Level of Detail (with RenderMan's smooth interpolation between levels)
- Automatic generation of shadow maps, including dynamic shadow angle for optimal use of shadow map resolution; raytraced shadows can also be used if supported by the renderer.
- Light linking, area lights, spotlight barn doors and other Maya light parameters supported.
- Texture Reference Objects for PRef data
- Area lights and global illumination for renderers supporting them.
- Background image planes
- Maya Cloth
- Maya Fur
- Maya Unlimited subdiv geometry

## Maya Features Not Currently Supported

- PaintFX

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