Mental ray material not compatible with render passes?

Artist_in_a_box

So in continuation from my original post below I discovered that car paint isn't compatible with render elements. I was able to get some success by using the specific element shader node and plugging the car paint shader into the special colour options of an arch and design but not really usable. So I answered my own question, it wont work. But to put this thread to some use I have another question.

Is there a work around for wanting to render car paint in passes in mental ray? I can manually frig the renders I need but my current render is a still shot. If I was to animate this manually putting completely new materials on everything doesn't seem like a particularly versatile pipeline and as cars are so common surely there's a workaround.

Cheers


Original post
Not a glaring issue, more something I am curious about. I have a mr car paint shader applied to my mesh. I am trying to learn a bit about composting and render passes and this material just wont render out a plain diffuse pass. I can get around this but that's kind of not the point when learning.

Is there some compatibility issues with some mental ray materials? I have heard SSS materials don't behave well with render passes either.

Cheers

rube

Try using the mi_car_paint_phen_x_passes shader. That should be fixed for render passes, though I haven't actually tried it.

Artist_in_a_box

Thanks. I have seen that shader mentioned before but always with Maya. I have found the shader xmsl file but cannot see how to use it. I can create a new MetaSL shader in the slate editor but no idea how to get that template into max.