MayaMan is a plug-in which allows Maya users to render their scenes with RenderMan compliant renderers such as Pixar’s PhotoRealistic RenderMan (PRman), AIR from SiTex and 3Delight. It is supported under Win2k, Win XP and Linux.

Features

MayaMan translates your Maya scene into RenderMan RIB format, and your materials into RenderMan shaders. It is difficult for MayaMan to support every single Maya feature, so this page outlines which aspects of your Maya scenes will be correctly translated to your RenderMan renderers, and also some general features of the MayaMan plugin.

• MayaMan is a fully integrated Maya plugin, which uses MEL for its interface and Maya attributes for data storage. This means MayaMan is fully scriptable and can be interfaced with by other Maya tools. It is not a closed ’black box’ like some other tools. MayaMan’s attributes can be animated or driven by expressions just like any normal Maya attributes.
• MayaMan can output to many different RenderMan renderers, so it is not tied to any particular rendering product. There are many exciting new RenderMan renderers currently in development, and MayaMan should support any popular products in the future.


• Maya materials are emulated through the Maya ’Magic Shaders’ mechanism, which writes custom RenderMan shaders on-the-fly to emulate your Maya material hierarchies. You can also attach custom RenderMan shaders for surfaces, displacements, volume or lights. Custom Shader parameters can be driven by Maya animation or expressions. It is possible to blend SL code with the Maya materials (though not to connect Maya materials as inputs to pre-compiled RenderMan Shaders.)


• A variety of RIB formatting styles from a single flat RIB file to the creation of well structured, efficient RIB files, taking full advantage of DelayedReadArchive. Separate ’qual’ files can be generated to allow the changing of quality parameters without needing to regenerate entire RIB file sequences.


• Facility for substituting scene geometry with ReadArchive RIB files or RunProcedural applications.


• Advanced renderer features such as Global Illumination supported.

Supported Maya Geometry

• NURBS surfaces


• Polygon meshes


• Particles - currently points, spheres, blobbies and sprites. The other types will also be supported soon.


• Curve primitives. You can render Maya curves as RiCurve primitives, including specifying curve width and materials.


• Subdivision meshes. Normal polygonal geometry can be rendered as subdiv surfaces, even without owning a Maya Unlimited licence.


• Fur


• Hair


• Pfx (rudimentary)


• Fluid (different export strategies depending on selected renderer and fluid node settings.

Supported Maya HyperGraph Nodes

Most materials you create in Maya’s Hypershade editor will be translated into RenderMan shaders and the result should be quite close to the Maya render of that material. Most Hypershade nodes are supported.

Support for additional HyperGraph nodes (such as 3rd party or internally developed shaders) can be added to MayaMan by the end users.