You can open the Preset Browser using the shelf button or the RenderMan menu.
Presets include categories for light rigs, environment lights, and materials.
Saving/Exporting a material is easy!
When an asset is saved to disk, all its dependencies are saved to disk too.
These include :
These dependencies can increase the size of a preset on disk and you should bear that in mind if you want to distribute them over the internet.
RenderManAssets have been designed to be easily transferable from one application (like Maya) to another (Katana, Houdini, Blender, etc) and vice-versa.
Still, it is possible to run into compatibility issues if your material contains native Maya nodes. RenderMan for Maya automatically converts a number of native Maya nodes which won't be available in other applications, e.g. the file node or Maya's Cloud pattern. To mitigate these problems, each RenderManAsset maintains a list of used nodes and use it to evaluate the preset's compatibility with the current host application and display a warning if it is not compatible.
The system will check :
If you want to ensure cross-application compatibility, avoid non-Pixar BxDFs and Patterns.
RenderMan ships with a standard library that can be found in : $RMANTREE/lib/RenderManAssetLibrary
We recommend that you copy the standard library to a location of your choice and leave the default library untouched as a backup. The new copy should be readable and writable. The asset browser will not allow you to create new assets if it points to a non-writable location. |
The location of the asset library can be set through an environment variable or a Maya preference.
The path to the asset library can be set through Maya's preference dialog :
You can shift-click the preset browser's shelf icon to directly open the library selection dialog ! |
The location of the asset library can be set through the RMAN_ASSET_LIBRARY
environment variable.
It can be set using different methods :
Maya.env is a configuration file read by Maya at startup to configure a number of environment variables. If this file doesn't exist, you can create a new one in one of the standard locations. This method works on all platforms : Linux, OSX, and Windows.
Type the following line at the end of Maya.env and Maya should find the standard library the next time it starts up :
RMAN_ASSET_LIBRARY = $RMANTREE/lib/RenderManAssetLibrary |
RMAN_ASSET_LIBRARY = %RMANTREE%/lib/RenderManAssetLibrary |
On all Posix platforms (Linux & OSX), you can either define the environment variable in the shell you will launch Maya from or append it to your shell configuration file (.cshrc
for csh/tcsh, .profile
or .bashrc
for bash).
setenv RMAN_ASSET_LIBRARY $RMANTREE/lib/RenderManAssetLibrary |
export RMAN_ASSET_LIBRARY=$RMANTREE/lib/RenderManAssetLibrary |
Right-click My Computer and choose Properties (or double-click System in the control panel), then click the Advanced tab, and click Environment Variables.