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TEXTURING / Substance for Mental Ray in Maya

Just like Mental Ray render for Maya, you need to enable Substance inside Plug-In Manager.


Once you enable Substance, you will have 2 extra nodes you can use inside Hypershade:


Of course by itself the Substance node does nothing, you actually need to use the Substance archives node, it comes with Substance Bonus Tools as examples:


Once you load the Substance archive, you can start using the "preset" procedural texture, it comes with parameters that you can adjust and animate:


To create the Substance archive yourself, you actually need Substance Designer, another additional tool that will cost you.
http://www.allegorithmic.com/products/substance-designer-4

SUBSTANCE FOR MENTAL RAY RENDER

Maya Substance will work right away if you are rendering using Maya Software Render, but it will NOT render if you use Mental Ray. Surprised? No, because this is Maya and it always has that extra additional workflow to make it work.

To convert Substance texture to use for Mental Ray, we actually need a Substance to Mental Ray converter script that comes with Substance Bonus Tools. A bit of hassle, but we have to live with this.

1. Download that extra "Bonus Tools".

Personally, I really don't like how Autodesk "provide" their plugins. They don't make it easy. Maya Bonus Tools is the same case. It should come built in with Maya and easy to install, but no, whenever users in need for that Bonus Tools, we always need to hunt around to download the file.

Here is exactly such case:
You need to register and use your username login to get into the AREA to get this Substance Bonus Tools. It is again, very dumb and inconsiderate of Autodesk for users.

As for today, AREA still does not provide SEARCH tool for users to search for the tools. We need to filter the category, and so on, until we found what we want.

Anyways, below are download links for your convenience:

For Windows:
https://area.autodesk.com/downloads/plugins/substance_bonus_tools_for_maya_2_0_windows

For Mac OS X:
https://area.autodesk.com/downloads/plugins/substance_bonus_tools_for_maya_2_0_mac_osx

For Linux:
https://area.autodesk.com/downloads/plugins/substance_bonus_tools_for_maya_2_0_linux

I am currently using Maya 2014 and the Substance Bonus Tools is now version 2.0 above. If you really need to zipped file in the hurry, getting there into the "closed" Area is a pain.

2. Copy and Install the Script
Once you got the zipped Substance Bonus Tools, simple unzip it and see inside the directory.

It has a bit of documentation about Substance node, but lacking of "how to install". This is why I am writing this blog post.

For Windows, files you need to copy into your computer in order to use the Substance Shelves is here:

 For MacOSX, you care about this folder:


Usually, the easiest to find the directory path to save your script is by opening Maya and run this MEL script below:

internalVar -userScriptDir;
// Result: C:/Users/Jimmy/Documents/maya/2014-x64/scripts/ //

You want to COPY and PASTE file according to the folder structure. So, "icons" files goes into "icons" folder, "scripts" files goes into "scripts" folder, and so on.

Surely, you can simply drag and drop folder in Windows, it will merge the files. However, DO NOT do this in Mac, because in Mac OS X, if you drag a folder into another folder with the same name, you will end up OVERRIDE the files (you lost the old files, and replace everything in the folder with new files). So, I suggest you, when using Mac, and want to copy bunch of files, do copy and paste the files.

3. Use the Substance Shelf
Substance Shelf
Now, with Substance Shelf installed, you can now convert your Substance material into Shader that Mental Ray can render. A single click on this icon on the shelves:


For every Substance node inside Hypershade, you want to convert it into Mental Ray Shader and assign the created shader to the 3D object one by one.

Note that the converted material is using Mental Ray Material, no longer the normal Maya Shader.


Substance texture should now render inside Mental Ray.

 

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