vMaterials using MDL!
With the release of Iray+ for 3ds Max today, NVIDIA has also released their first set of materials based on the Material Definition Language (MDL).
While mental ray 3.13 has limited support for MDL, 3.14 promises complete support. In the meantime you can register and download these and give them a shot in mental ray 3.13 for Maya 2016 or most anything supporting MDL materials. Keep in mind the UI for populating attributes isn’t complete for this release of Maya and may take some work to try. You can also see how the materials are written with a text editor.
The download will install the vMaterial Hub and Library. You can find them on Windows here: C:\Users\YourUserName\Documents\mdl\nvidia\vMaterials
You can register here for the download links: vMaterials Download
Some preset materials.
Posted on December 1, 2015, in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. 9 Comments.
elemental ray 
Thanks for these. I’m sure they will be awesome.
So we point to them with MI_MDL_PATH in maya.env- Is that correct? Cause they show up in the list but i get a fatal error when i try to render with them. Here is how that looks:
MI_MDL_PATH=C:\Program Files\Autodesk\mentalrayForMaya2016\shaders\mdl;\\NAS\Data_nas\CustomShaders\mdl_packages;\\NAS\Data_nas\CustomShaders\mdl_packages\vMaterials
thanks:)
I’ve copied the “mdl_examples_for_maya_3dsmax” folder into:
C:\Users\danielaf\Documents\maya\2016\mdl
then my Maya.env file contains the following line:
MI_MDL_PATH=C:\Users\danielaf\Documents\maya\2016\mdl
Doing this, I didn’t need to go into my: “ProgramFiles/autodeskmentalrayForMaya2016\shaders\mdl folder” at all.
If you placed them in that shaders\mdl folder, I don’t believe you have to modify the maya.env file.
Also reading “http://blog.mentalray.com/2015/05/08/using-mdl-with-mental-ray-for-maya-2016/”,
It mentions “In its initial state, the mdl_material node does not come with a swatch render, has no viewport representation and is also not supposed to work with IPR. These limitations will be removed in future releases.”
I’ve been working with the mdl_material node and the sample MDLs provided, in IPR mental ray. 🙂
-Cheers
Thanks for the hints!
Just wanted to add, the packages released in september are working. (‘Automotive Cataloge’ and ‘MDL Examples for maya/3dsmax’)
It’s only the new vMaterial materials that crash maya.
as per daniealaf (thanks) i was able to simplify my maya.env file. It now points only at the mdl folder. The contents of all three packages are available in maya.
MI_MDL_PATH=\\NAS\Data_nas\CustomShaders\mdl_packages
and in that:
..\automotive catalog\..
..\mdl examples for maya 3dsmas\..
..\vMaterials\..
vMaterials also reference other MDL materials, this may be something to support later?
Everytime I tried to render using Vmaterial, Maya kept on crashing 😦 Does anyone experience same thing ?
Thanxs
Might be an installation issue. Also be aware some of these aren’t compatible with 3.13 but should be for 3.14. You can also try them with Iray for Whatever with an evaluation version.
The vmaterials have a dependency on the NVIDIA core_definitions. This module gets installed under C:\ProgramData\NVIDIA Corporation\mdl.
Try to add that directory to the MI_MDL_PATH in the Maya.env.
Hope that helps!
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