You can see visual representations of mental ray for Maya shading nodes and mental ray for Maya custom shaders in swatch form in Maya.
You can visualize reflection and refraction in the shaderball swatches. To do so, select Windows > Settings/Preferences > Preferences to open the Preferences window. Navigate to the Rendering section, then select Enable ray-tracing for shaderball swatches. When this mode is enabled, the background of the swatch is set to a checkerboard so that you can see reflections and refractions.
When the swatch is updating, it is outlined in red. The swatches are rendered in a background thread and do not block UI performance.
If you have more than one editor open in Maya, the swatches in the editors are rendered in the following order:
- Attribute Editor
- Hypershade
- Node Editor
- In mental ray for Maya, swatch rendering is supported for: material shaders, procedural texture shaders, sample compositing shaders, and data conversion shaders.
- To maintain maximum performance when IPR is running, swatches in Hypershade are not updated.