Maya - Materials For Different Renderers

Recursive Sweatpants

I've been fiddling around with Maya for a while and I'm currently going around trying out a bunch of renderers like Mental Ray, Furryball, and Renderman to see which I can figure out how to actually use. However, all three of those renderers alone highly recommend if not outright require their own materials to be used on the models.

For a character rig of mine, I've created default Blinn materials for him. Before I start recreating these materials for all the other renderers, I would like to know if there are any tips or good practices you guys could give me. Is it smart to just create custom materials for each renderer and save them all with the character? I would have to load every plugin for each renderer if I were to import or reference him into a new scene, which I'd imagine wouldn't be ideal. Is it possible to store just the materials in separate files and reference them onto the character only when I need them? Or am I overthinking this and I should just pick a renderer+materials and stick with that forever?

Burpee

You should pick a render a stick with it, but if you still want to learn multiple render engine at once, that could be interessting to recreate the same material in each engine, 
I find it a bit weird to have multiple shader from differente engine in the same scene, I'd create a new scene for each engine, 

hf !

Recursive Sweatpants

Burpee said:

You should pick a render a stick with it, but if you still want to learn multiple render engine at once, that could be interessting to recreate the same material in each engine, 
I find it a bit weird to have multiple shader from differente engine in the same scene, I'd create a new scene for each engine, 

hf !

Yeah, I currently have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to rendering so I'm taking a shotgun approach, going back and forth between a bunch of methods haphazardly and hoping I can stumble upon something that will give me nice results without having to wait friggen hours per frame and also preferably isn't FurryBall because that renderer is buggy and annoying but it's the only free goddamned GPU renderer I can find for Maya goddammit.

But I don't want to split my character up into different files just for different rendering engines, as I'm constantly tweaking the mesh and the rig since I'm kind of haphazardly learning those workflows as well. What I'm asking is if there's some way of managing materials so I don't have to have the plugins for each renderer all loaded at once on the character file but I can still use the materials if and when I need them.

throttlekitty

Learning how to best use renderers and shaders for them is a pretty in-depth thing, I'd also suggest picking one. Or downloading some presets and trying them out.

But yeah, you can save a material to it's own scene file. In the Hypershade, select the material, and File>Export selected network, save it as a .ma.

oglu

if you are in maya learn arnold... autodesk bought solidangle so its most likely arnold will be the standard for maya in the future... no need to learn different render engines... if you know one you are up to speed in a short time if you have to learn a new one....