Rendering game models in Maya?

RageUnleashed

I was wondering, what is the best was to set up your materials for a game model in Maya? I've thought plugging the texture into both the color and the ambient nodes would work, but that blows the texturing out. And viewport renders seem to go screwy when you apply an alpha channel...I think I'm missing something here, anyone have any ideas?

MoP

I usually just turn the lighting to "Use No Lights" in the viewport and take a screengrab. Alternately you can throw the Incandescence channel all the way up to 100%, but that only makes it look fullbright in the viewport, and it blows it out in renders.
I haven't explored rendering in Maya much yet, so I'd be interested to hear this too...

Jeff Parrott

I do it Mop's method, but usually turn on high quality if I've got normal maps. Although for envirs I tend to set up mental ray or the default renderer. If you're trying to render plug in the texture to the color and set up a decent lighting scheme with some ambients and directionals.

Daz

If you need to render as opposed to screengrab, just set up your lights, and up the ambient channel in the textures by 50% ( no need to put the actual texture in the ambient channel ). I find that gives a pretty good look.

RageUnleashed

Yea but no matter what in the viewport, if you have alpha channels being used for transparency maps, it makes the rest of the model all screwy I've noticed...like you can see only backfaces or something...

Daz, you mean make the ambient of the material 50% grey correct?

Daz

yeah just ramp up the ambient to 50% grey.

Snowfly

Detach the faces with alpha into separate objects, that should make them sort properly. But that's a lot of trouble for a screengrab, so I don't usually bother.

I have a theory that if you work really organized and put everything with transparency on a separate texture sheet, then everything should z-sort properly without any tricks. But I haven't really tried it, so I don't know if it's bs or what.

MoP

Screengrab and render in Max. BWAHAHAHA!

Pseudo

Snowfly is correct about the alpha sorting. If you save out your alpha maps as seperate images and plug them directly into the shader then they generally work fine in the viewport. However if you plug a .tga file with alpha information into a shader, then Maya will choke on it and the alpha sorting goes to hell.

As far as I know, that's the only way to get it working correctly.

Gmanx

Doesn't Maya have inverted alpha values? I seem to remember having to invert my alpha texture map node to get Maya to render the right bit.