multiple mental ray shader nodes on one object
 

does anyone know how to get multiple mental ray nodes like mia_material and the sss shader onto one object without actually blending them in?

i tried doing this by using the layeredshader node (because the mib_color_mix didn't have an option for transparency), i plugged in the mental ray node's colours and gave it an alpha map and it worked ok... except for the final result not being the same as what it would be if the mental ray node was connected straight to the shading group

Think that Gen had something on her blog about it. not too sure but you could try the mix20 shader.

yeah, retreated back to Gen's blog when i realised i couldn't plug the mental ray shader straight into the mib_color_mix without knowing what needs to be plugged into what

hmm, maybe i need to add in more nodes of other types to, do some exploring of what the pthers can do...

i thought of using teb mix20layer that you mentioned to me before... i do have it... just need to play..

Hey Chirone, assuming that you're talking about an mia_material, you need to plug the "result" (I guess it sounded cooler than "output") into the mib_color_mix color slot. You can plug any texture you want in there, but they seem to have a funky kinda masking effect on the alpha channel of the render unless you bump up the texture's alpha offset to 1. As far as textures go, you can fill up color mix nodes and plug each one into another color mix node's slot and dump that on your shader, I wonder how many color mix nodes you can link together before major slowdown o.O

I never did try the mix8 or mix20, I heard they were pretty good. I have also heard of using a surface shader as a mule to plug an mia_mat into the maya layered shader, though I don't care for the layered shader's interface I'm probably going to look into it later.

MR materials with layerd shaders are sloooooooow. I use the mix as the layered for MR, no probs and nice and fast.

Mix as in mib_color_mix or ctrl mix? The thing that cheeses me off about the mib mix is that I wished it allowed you to middle mouse drag and swap the node order around like in the Maya layered. Is it really that slow? lol Ahh now I really have to test it out. Cheers for the heads up Steve :D

Nah, Mix as in the mix20 layer shader. Sorry for the confusion, haha!

well.. i found the sampling compositing nodes are of help to me, i can make parts of the model fully transparent where i want the other colour to be, but i tried hooking it up to a mib_color_mix and nothing happened

well, something did happen.. the entire model when black

i tried using the mix20 but nothing would ever render
hit render, 2 seconds later i get nothing

I've never messed around with the sample comp shaders but but maybe you should check the number of inputs dialed in on the color mix, if you have colors in slot 1,2 and 3 but have 4 inputs dialed in, its going to include the color info in slot 4, which by default is black soooooo, I dunno, I'm just throwing that out there, sometimes its the simple stuff that we overlook, or it could just be that those two nodes don't like each other. /shrug

i looked at that, but it was the right number... i think i was pluggin it into the wrong slots... i didn't save it so i dont know what i did wrong...

i tired taking the mib_transparency node and map the colour into that

but i found that the transparency and opacity nodes don't go fully transparent...

i took the transparent nodes and plugged them into the mib_color_mix and i seemed to have gotten two materials on one object as expected... but they didn't sit right

i adjusted the second material and it didn't change at all

i tried using all the different mix modes... none of them led to the desired result


maybe you just can't do it...

maybe you just can't have more than one mental ray material on the same object and have them not blend into each other...

maybe i should just give up and select faces and assign materials that way.........
the old way that i did my first two models by...

now that i know about "select objects with material" changing the materials completely shouldn't be so bad now ;)

hello..i am new to this site.. and i need a complete procedure of about how may i connect two shadders to ana object..