Blog

Tips, tricks and tutorials on Autodesk maya, Arnold, mental ray and more. With this blog we want to share the big or small discoveries we make during our everyday work.

5 ways to color correct your textures in Maya

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Published: Thursday, 26 March 2015 08:00
Written by Paolo Mazzoccato
5 modi di modificare il colore delle texture in maya

Maya features various methods to make color corrections on textures from its interface, some are widely known, others less. In this article I'll explain the most useful methods from my point of view.

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AO pass bug correction in Render Proxy

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Published: Thursday, 12 February 2015 08:00
Written by Paolo Mazzoccato
image of rabbits for render proxy and ambient occlusion bug correction illustration

I am writing this article to complete the one I wrote on how to obtain the depth pass with mental ray's assembly files in Maya. I was recently made aware that even the Ambient Occlusion pass doesn't work correctly

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How to map a texture to a curved path

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Published: Monday, 01 December 2014 08:00
Written by Paolo Mazzoccato
immagni mappatura uv che segue il percorso della geometria

When you are dealing with architectural visualization projects it often happens that you have to texture objects that have curved shapes. In most cases they are roads, sidewalks or other pathways.

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Depth pass bug correction in render proxy

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Published: Saturday, 07 June 2014 08:00
Written by Paolo Mazzoccato
immagine conigli render proxy e depth pass

Mental ray's Assemblies (also called Render Proxy) are a tool to load specific objects on-demand while rendering. This makes them extremely efficient in memory usage.

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Mental Ray 2015 Satellite setup problem

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Published: Thursday, 08 May 2014 08:00
Written by Paolo Mazzoccato
output window image Mental Ray 2015 satellite

We have recently updated our Maya license to the 2015 version. There are some very good new features for mental ray however we noticed that Mental Ray Satellite doesn't work just after installing in Windows environments. We haven't tested it in Mac or Linux environments.

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Setting up colored metals in mental ray

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Published: Tuesday, 15 April 2014 08:00
Written by Paolo Mazzoccato
Impostazione di metalli colorati in mental ray

Finally i'm back after a long time of silence due to months of hard work. The topic that I will discuss in this blog post is the creation of colored metals in mental ray, specifically, using the mia_material_x shader.

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Using displacement on objects with hard edges

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Published: Monday, 25 November 2013 08:00
Written by Paolo Mazzoccato
displacement con hard edge in maya e mental ray

This article follows the previous one in which I explained how to correctly setup a material with displacement in mental ray. In this post I would like to deal with a problem that comes up often while working on architectural rendering projects.

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Setting up displacement in Maya and Mental Ray

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Published: Saturday, 17 August 2013 09:41
Written by Paolo Mazzoccato

In maya there are two methods to apply a displacement texture on a material.
The first is the classic one, and it hasn't changed from the traditional workflow that was used in the Software Render.

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Film gate setup for photographic matching

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Published: Monday, 22 July 2013 09:41
Written by Paolo Mazzoccato
film gate sensore reflex digitale

In this article we will try to understand how to set the film gate in the cameras in maya in order to virtually recreate the optical conditions of a real camera. In this way, no matter what device is being used to capture the images, from the smartphone to the professional camera, we will be able to reproduce the same angle of view in 3D.

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Mental ray IBL inverted textures correction

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Published: Saturday, 29 June 2013 09:41
Written by Paolo Mazzoccato
mentalrayIbl fix fiat 500

One of the problems of mental ray's image base lighting node in maya, created through the indirect lighting tab in the render settings, is that the maps are visualized inverted on the horizontal axis. This bug was present right from the first implementation of this function in maya and it still hasn't been corrected.

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Area lights with IES profiles do not work

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Published: Tuesday, 25 June 2013 09:41
Written by Paolo Mazzoccato
mental ray area light con profili ies in maya

Recently I found myself in trouble using mental ray's mia_phometric_light shader with ies profiles. I use quite often this node, but in my last projects for some strange reason i couldn't make them work.

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article blog dummy 1

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Published: Tuesday, 01 January 2013 09:41
Written by Paolo Mazzoccato

Dummy content.