mib_color_mix connections ?
 

ahoi everyone!

I am currently experimenting with skin shading. Since my girl finally gets her own avatar version of herself I need to make use of misss_fast_skin_maya and misss_skin_specular. both shaders are about to be plugged into the mib_color_mix.

but either I missed a thing or made incorrect connections to the mib_color_mix or it is a buggy thing (which I dont believe!) I added an animatedGIF to show the rendered results. despite the quality of my settings in this stage it shows clearly that with the mib_color_mix (only the misss_fast_skin_maya is stuffed into it right now, but it looks the same with a second shader!) the scattering effect is lost -> watch the ear on the left side.

what I did is to simply drag and drop the sss shader onto the first slot of mib_color_mix. the connection editor shows:

misss_fast_skin_maya (outValue) --> mib_color_mix (color_0)

if I´d connect it to Color Base it will render completely black btw.


I did a lot of reading yesterday but still can´t figure out how to properly connect shaders (in particular SSS shaders) with the mib_color_mix.

can anyone please lend me a helping hand?

many thanks in advance
_falott

hi again,

I realized that this mib_color_mix isn´t a shader mixer but just a color mixing tool.
so...how should one be able to combine these shaders:

misss_fast_skin_maya + misss_skin_specular

other than rendering 2 single passes each time and composite them in photoshop?



there must be a reasonable way to do this entirely in maya.

any ideas?

well.. obviously there is no thread anywhere on the internet which descibes the process of hooking up 2 mentalray shaders properly in a layered setup or I´m just blind. on the other hand why not use the Specularity tab within the misss_fast_skin_maya since it should work the same way as misss_skin_specular does. honestly said, by now I can´t remenber why I was searching for a way to implement the specular skin shader. I guess misss_fast_skin_maya must do the trick as well.

Did you connect the misss' lightmap to the color_mix's shading grp?

interesting question - no I didn´t. let´s try

doesn´t work either:

// Error: *Fatal* (mental ray) : mental ray encountered a fatal error. The system may have become unstable. Please save the scene and exit Maya. //
// Error: (Mayatomr.Output) : failed during mental ray rendering: mental ray abort //

D: Yikes!

I did a blog post on this very same thing.

http://gennyx.blogspot.com/2009/06/l...al-ray_02.html

And I even went ahead and tried with the default color mix again, and it worked.

http://i300.photobucket.com/albums/n.../colorMix1.png

ahoi!

Funny, I came across both articles while researching, but didn´t read through all the text!
I remember I had a good laugh tho ->

""....Initially, I tried just dragging and dropping it onto the geometry, the connection editor popped up, its not a material duh! So after that brain fart I tried figuring out..."

because thats exactly the same what happened to me in the beginning.


I will dig into your's and Jay´s explanations later this day. Thanks a lot for pointing to them again!