Materials / Maya
Verge3D for Maya supports the following types of materials (shaders):
- aiStandardSurface
- Standard Surface (Maya 2020+ only)
- Lambert
- Blinn, Phong, Phong E
- Surface Shader
- aiMixShader
- aiFlat
In addition, you can use the following texture and utility nodes:
- File
- 2d Placement
- Bump 2d
- Ramp
- Sampler Info
- Layered Texture
- Color Composite
- Float Composite
- Color Constant
- Float Constant
- aiNormalMap
- aiFacingRatio
- animCurveTA
- animCurveTU
aiStandardSurface
This shader comes with Arnold for Maya (MtoA) and can represent many real-world materials (such as metals, plastics, glass, wood etc) by using physically-based shading model.
The following aiStandardSurface settings are supported in Verge3D:
Base Panel
- Weight or (Base input in Hypershade)
- Color or (Base Color input in Hypershade)
- Metalness
Specular Panel
- Weight (Specular input in Hypershade)
- Color (Specular Color input in Hypershade)
- Roughness (Specular Roughness input in Hypershade)
Emission Panel
- Weight (Emission input in Hypershade)
- Color (Emission Color input in Hypershade)
Geometry Panel
- Opacity
- Bump Mapping (Normal Camera input in Hypershade)
Additional Verge3D Settings
You can tweak your aiStandardSurface materials by using the following settings located on Verge3D panel:
- Alpha Mode
- select transparency mode: Auto, Opaque, Blend or Mask.
- Two Sided
- make your material two-sided. By default, Verge3D renders only front side of materials, enable this option to render their reverse side as well.
- Depth Write
- render material depth in depth buffer. Use this option for transparent materials to make them rendered in additive manner.
- Depth Test
- perform depth test calculations when rendering your material. Disabling depth test is useful when rendering objects inside semi-transparent objects to prevent them from being culled by the covering objects.
- Dithering
- reduce banding artifacts by using pixel dithering.
- glTF 2.0 Compatible
- force the material to be glTF 2.0 compatible. See the following guide for more information.
Standard Surface
Standard Surface shader was introduced in Maya 2020. It's based on and very similar to aiStandardSurface.
Since it's better supported in Maya Viewport 2.0 and does not require Arnold plug-in to be installed, we recommend it for use when authoring your Verge3D content in Maya 2020 or above.
Lambert
Basic yet highly efficient node which can be used to represent materials with no specular reflections.
Blinn, Phong, Phong E
In Verge3D, these materials will be approximated by the PBR shading model, thus they might look differently compared to Maya Viewport.
Performance Considerations
Being the only choice for creating nice and realistic renders, Standard Surface (or aiStandardSurface) nevertheless require more computing power from your GPU and slows down app loading. This is especially true for scenes with lots of such materials.
To improve performance you can tweak Texture Resolution or IBL Environment Mode property.
Got Questions?
Feel free to ask on the forums!