Maya Hybrid Mental Ray & Maya Color Material
One of the major improvements in Domemaster3D is a handy new Domemaster3D Maya shelf preset, and menu item "Create Hybrid MR + Maya Color Material". This tool creates a new mental ray shading network that is easier to use then the previous surface material presets as it uses the familiar Maya place2dTexture node for positioning textures.
The Domemaster3D shelf icon for the new Hybrid MR + Maya Color Material tool is a golden colored sphere that has a checker pattern on it:
You can also access the Hybrid Material by switching to the Rendering menu set, and then opening the Domemaster3D menu and looking under the Lens Shader Compatible Materials section:
What makes this shading network a "hybrid" material is that is borrows the technique first developed for the Domemaster3D Starglobe material where a classical mental ray style shading network is used with the mentalrayTexture node for rendering with mental ray which eliminates any possible lens shader blurry streak artifacts, and then the real-time viewport uses a Maya file texture node and a lambert material to make the interactive preview of the shading network much crisper with full resolution texture maps visible when working in the perspective view, rendering playblasts, or outputting a PlayblastVR based hardware panoramic rendering.
Here is a snapshot of the shading network generated by the "Hybrid MR + Maya Color Material" tool:
The mentalrayTexture node is used to load the imagery for the shading network and this texture node has the custom "extra attribute" based additions for loading image sequences applied too. The file texture name in the mentalrayTexture node is then linked to a stock Maya file node that is used to drive the real-time viewport version of the shading network.
A shared place2Dtexture node dramatically improves the usability of the hybrid shading network by making it easier to use your traditional Maya software renderer knowledge and skills to adjust the texture rotation, offset, and scale compared to having to use the mental ray based mib_texture_remap node for texture placement. (In Maya the mib_texture_remap node has an atrocious user interface with a raw 4×4 translation matrix in the user interface so it is great to have a chance to get as far away from it as possible).
The hybrid material shading group then has the "Suppress all Maya Shaders" attribute enabled so the "mia_material_x_passes" surface material is used at render time. All of this stuff is set up automatically so you don’t have to fuss around with any custom node connections in the Hypershade.
This hybrid shading network works well in the real-time perspective view with Viewport 2.0, the legacy default renderer, and the legacy high quality rendering modes.
Note: If the Viewport 2.0 window doesn’t show a crisp version of the textures in the scene, saving and re-opening the scene will cause the textures to re-fresh automatically.
The Hybrid material's place2dTexture node connections to the mental ray shading network don't allow for the wrapU and wrapV attributes to have any effect. This means you have to keep your textures inside the 0-1 UV space and avoid rotating the texture maps to a value other than 0/90/180/270 degrees if you don't want to have the background area behind the texture's image boundary edges to become visible.
If you need to make a texture map repeat infinitely or have a random rotation angle, you can still use any of the other Domemaster3D mental ray based material presets like:
Color Material Button
Color + Bump Material Button
Color Image Sequence Material Button