Standard Surface - Arnold for Maya
| Further Reading |
|---|
| See Standard Surface in the Arnold User Guide for the full shader documentation. |
The standard_surface shader is a physically-based shader capable of producing many types of materials.
The MtoA material library can be found here.
- Further information about physically based rendering in Arnold can be found here.
- A conversion script (Arnold > Utilities > Convert Shaders) that converts legacy standard shaders to standard_surface shaders is available in the Arnold Utility menu of MtoA. This simple script also converts unsupported materials (Phong, Blinn, mia_material, etc..).
- Videos that show how to use transmission_scatter can be found here and here.
- A video tutorial that shows how to render bubbles nested dielectrics in Arnold can be found here.
An example scene file that demonstrates transmit_AOVs can be downloaded here.
Standard Surface Presets
standard_surface presets available in the attribute editor
Bump Mapping
The bump mapping attribute accepts a shader that perturbs the normal for bump mapping.
A tutorial that shows how to combine normal and bump maps can be found here.
Normal Mapping
Normal mapping works by replacing the interpolated surface normal by the one evaluated from an RGB texture, where each channel (Red, Green, Blue) represents an axis and strength for the bump. It can be faster than bump mapping since bump mapping requires evaluating the shader underneath three or more times.
When using Color Management in Maya (2017), normal maps should be set to RAW.
In the example below a normal map is connected to a Maya bump2d node which is connected to the bump mapping attribute of a Standard Surface shader.
Note that adjusting the Bump Depth attribute will have no effect on the normal map.
Normal map -> Maya bump_2d. 2d Bump set to tangent_space_normals
Arnold Attributes
FlipR
The FlipR button will flip the Red Channel of the Normal Map.
FlipR
The FlipG button will flip the Green Channel of the Normal Map.
FlipG
Swap Tangents
The Swap Tangents will switch the Red and Green channels of the selected Normal Map.
Swap Tangents
Use Derivatives
Enables the use of derivative normal maps. If you disable 'Use Derivatives' when using tangent-space normal mapping, the bump shader uses the tangent and bitangent data stored on the mesh. Otherwise (by default), the bump shader will use the UV surface derivatives from the Arnold shading globals.