Hi,

I can't seem to find informations about how mantra shaders are converted to Maya. Since it seems like they are imported I thought there is something we can do with it but so far, I couldn't do much.

Basically I want to use some noise patterns from houdini and get those informations to either displace or color my geometry in Maya. Is this possible ?

Thanks
Chris

The shaders aren't really converted into Maya materials. Only basic parameters like ogl_diff and ogl_tex1 are carried into the Maya scene, and then connected to the Maya materials.

Houdini Engine does support outputting COP textures. So you could generate noise pattern with COP, use it as a texture in ogl_tex1, and it'll be outputted into Maya. See the attached asset for an example.

Hi,

thanks for your answer, cool to see that I can use cop informations in texture but since I'm interested in using whatever animated pattern I build in a shader into a maya shader, is there any way to bring a mantra shader result into a cop ? I feel like without having a huge amount of polygon I won't be able to create a smooth texture to import it in Maya without using Mantra. I'd be happy to be wrong though.

Thanks for you help
Chris

There's a Render COP that can render a mantra rop into COP. And the mantra rop can bake shaders into textures uv. So, it's possible to (ab)use that to bake a mantra shader into texture, and output it into Maya as a texture.

See the attached file for how this could be done. The setup is a bit unusual and not ideal, but it kind of works. The key points in the setup are:
1. reference_geo: The original geometry that has UV setup
2. shader_to_bake: The shader that you want to bake
3. bake_render: Use a mantra rop to render the out into UV
4. bake_render_cop: References the mantra rop into COP
5. texture_shader: Uses COP as texture

Hope this makes sense!

Sounds pretty great ! Not sure how far we'll go with it but I'm sure it's gonna help us optimizing some stuff.

Thanks awong !
Chris

Houdini Engine does support outputting COP textures. So you could generate noise pattern with COP, use it as a texture in ogl_tex1, and it'll be outputted into Maya. See the attached asset for an example.

Andrew, this is INSANE!!! you should add this to things that are supported…