Maya: Rendering Normal Maps in Mental Ray

In this lesson I cover how to render normal maps in mental ray for Maya, and a small tweak to get mirrored normal maps to render correctly.

Thanks to Jason C. for the Tutorial Request.

Runtime: ~5 min

Software: Maya, mental ray

Instructor: Leo Covarrubias

Comments

[JasonC]

very helpful... thank you.

[Garrick]

For future video's it would be great to see a Maya tutorial on detailed setup and styling of male hair.
Then rendering hair out to different layers for shadow, alpha, spec, Ambient Occlusion and color diffusion.
Btw, how can I bake out just the hair shadow to a texure of a head object?

Also how would you add a cavity map on an object with bump map and displacement maps from zbrush 3.5 r3 to Maya 20011?

Thanks for these great tutorials!

[david]

Hello, when I render normal maps in mental ray , they look how they are supposed to but, they render a little blurrier than the view port and maya hardware render, do you know why this is ?

[Leo]

Probably the filtering happening through the file node. You can change your filter type from Quadratic to MipMap or None, or play with the filtering amount under filenode > effects > filter. It may also be in part due to the overall scene filtering - check the render settings multi-pixel filtering option - "Mitchell" may give a crisper result

[Peter]

Thank you very much for this one..Very informative..nice one!