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The main material used for making objects, props, and characters in RenderMan is the PxrSurface material. This is a single (and therefore "monolithic") material used for all kinds of shading jobs. Each section of the material represents a particular "lobe" of the material.
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- Textures should be named appropriately based on their destined effect and object assignment. For example: <object>_<effect>.jpg or possibly tableTop_specular.jpg
- Do not use spaces and special characters in names like: theCar&boat.jpg or "the Car and Boat.jpg"
- Do not use spaces and special characters in file paths either. These textures may fail to load.
- Texture sequences should have a clear naming convention for frame number. mySequence.0001.jpg is correct rather than mySequence0001.jpg or mySequence.jpg.0001
- Most formats can be used such as .png, exr, .tif, and .jpg, but to be rendered they must be converted to the .tex format. In Maya this happens when you begin a render and cached on disk to be reused until changed or updated in the scene. Scenes with many textures may take awhile to convert the first time to render.
- Occasionally interchangeable naming pairs occur, consistency is important to your pipeline and artist's ability to work accurately.
- Diffuse and Albedo
- Roughness and Glossiness (please take note that RenderMan uses the standard "Roughness" convention where 0 = mirrored and 1 = rough or nearly diffuse) Roughness also applies to a Diffuse parameter so occasionally artists substitute Glossiness as the name.
- Textures can be color (RGB) and scalar (greyscale) and color channels can be connected to matching parameters to drive them. For example, the Red channel of an image can use used to drive a scalar (float slider) if it's useful.
- Normal maps are typically preferred over bump maps (scalar or grayscale) for their detail.
- Linear color workflow is highly recommended and textures where their color is visible in the final render should be linearized (the typical sRGB gamma curve should be removed for rendering). Textures used as data like bump, masks, and displacement, should not be linearized.
- Displacement maps and other data textures should be the highest precision possible to avoid artifacts from texture quantizing. Usually these are exported from modeling applications as floating point EXR or Tiff. See workflows for normal and scalar displacement.
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Using the IPR mode in Maya, you can pass your textures through some utility nodes and make some value adjustments directly in the render.
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The pattern networks can be evaluated during the render every time it processes the texture or you can bake the result and improve overall efficiency for complex assets. (You might want to avoid baking things until you have final approval from the client to avoid endless trips to the render farm.) Some patterns are more expensive to evaluate than others and can begin to impact your scene render times. Baking can improve this since it's simply evaluated once as a texture and cached. You can find out more on the topic of efficiency by looking at the article on Improving Performance. |
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While Ptex can save time preparing assets for texturing, the performance is not as good as using standard textures on objects with UV's defined. This cost and benefit balance should be weighed when planning a project. If you have many objects to texture, Ptex may save your artists time overall. Otherwise you may find better rendering efficiency and simplification with texture maps and typical UDIM (or "tiled") UV layout. |
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Below, the Specular Roughness texture is changed using a PxrColorCorrect node and adjusted in Maya's IPR. Different Gamma values are used in the Color Correct section of the pattern. Since the texture is a grayscale (scalar) map, the RGB channels all have identical values. Only the Red Channel is manipulated and then connected to the Primary Specular Roughness parameter. Alternatively you could connect the Color Correct pattern to a conversion node like the PxrToFloat pattern, but this adds another evaluation to the node graph that's not necessary in this example.
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Layering this affect more easily has two options we'll talk about and a third concern about trace depth covered in another document:
- Using PxrLayerSurface to separate and then combine the shading of the glass and the dirt.
- Correct UV layout to prevent texture repetition on the inside and outside.
- Controlling ray depth appropriately to get the right physical result for glass.
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When rendering most glass containers with liquids, it's helpful to understand intersection priority to avoid artifacts and "air gaps". This is technically known as the dielectric interface or nested dielectrics. |
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This scene makes use of a common three-point lighting scene. There is a fill light that makes use of the PxrDomeLight, a rim and key light that use a PxrRectLight.
With the exception of the Fill Light, the other lights use the emission focus to create a softer edge and a subtle spotlight effect.
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