Maya - Other Materials

Owned by
Mihnea Balta (Unlicensed)
Last updated: 21 Dec, 2011Version comment
3 min read

Maya Materials

The following Maya materials are translated into Maxwell approximations:

  • Lambert: a material with a single diffuse BSDF is created. The color attribute is mapped to reflectance 0, the transparency attribute is mapped to the transmittance and refractiveIndex is used as the Nd. The roughness is set to 99.
  • Blinn: the translation is based on a metal preset with two components: a shiny BSDF with roughness 5 and a diffuse BSDF with roughness 90. In both BSDFs, the color attribute is mapped to reflectance 0 and 90 and transparency is mapped to transmittance. The reflectivity attribute is multiplied by 100 and used as the weight of the first BSDF, while the weight of the second BSDF is set to 20. The Nd is set to 20 in the shiny BSDF and 3 in the diffuse one. The shiny BSDF also has an anisotropy of 20.
  • Phong: based on a plastic preset with two BSDFs: a glossy one with roughness 5 and a diffuse one with roughness 100. The color attribute is mapped to reflectance 0 and transparency is mapped to transmittance on both BSDFs. The weight of the diffuse layer is 100 and the reflectivity attribute is scaled by 100 and used as the weight of the glossy layer. The Nd value is 3 for the diffuse component and 2.5 for the glossy one.

If a bump or normal map is present on any of these materials, it is used in Maxwell as well. The attenuation distance is set to 100 centimeters in all three cases. The following images show the result of using the supported shaders on the Simball object with the color set to blue and all other attributes left to their defaults:

Lambert

Blinn

Phong

These approximations are only provided as a starting point for existing scenes. For precise control over the look of your scenes and accurate results you should always use the Maxwell Layered Material node.

Legacy Material

The Maxwell Material node - notice the missing "Layered" in the name - represents an old material model used in Maxwell 1. It is only kept for compatibility reasons and should never be used in new scenes. The Maxwell Layered Material node completely replaces the old material, offering all of its features, plus the improvements made in Maxwell 2. The old node will most likely be removed in the next major Maxwell release.