Network rendering in Maya

My last project was to try network rendering in maya. What is network rendering ? short variant is: you have 2 or more computers and you need to render something, if you will use just your workstation is possible to wait some time, but why to not use and the rest of your computers ? Yes is possible with some work. Maya documentation from autodesk site is difficult to follow because is not well focused and help from other users is not to much on the internet.
Generally speaking first you need 2 or more computers but not more then 8 if you have one single core processors on those machines. On the master machine you will use to render mental ray but before that you must to setup maya.rayhosts file according with Maya documentation. This file is just a text file where you put the IP from slave hosts and port number used for comunication. On slave machines you must to have Maya with mental ray satellite installed. When everything is ready from render menu chose render (batch or single frame) with options and be sure to have network render check and press render.
Because nothing is easy, my problem was to set properly maya.rayhosts file which is a text file with .txt extention changed to .rayhosts but be careful to format the text inside to plan text first and be sure to have this content: slave machines IP:port number (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:xxxx) with no space inside and every new IP on a new row.
Conclusion: render job on the local machine 6 minutes and 8 seconds, render job on the one slave machine identical with  the master one 8 minutes and 50 seconds, job render with local and network render (two identical machines conected with a simple UTP LAN cable) 3 minutes and 34 seconds.

PS: because my script editor refuse to display verbosity information higher than level 3 (warnings) no matter what settings I made from render menu, I discovered that on mac is very good to use console from operating sistem to display status messages from render jobs.

Maya mia_material_x

When you say chrome material in Maya, you have not one but more options. First will be dgs material from hypershade / mental ray materials, second will be blinn material with some environment textures, I will not detailed because you will find tons of documentation on web if you simply search those terms on Google. But from my experience I will recommend to not spend your time with this and just use the best solution: Mia_material_x. If you will make a simple search you will find all you need from internet, this material is great not only for chrome shading which is already predefined in presets but for many other things.
Be carefully to use indirect lighting in mental ray render, and at image based lighting to load a image (a simply gradient from black to white will be perfect) but is mandatory to be saved in RGB mode, even if we talk about gradients in black and white.

After some adjustments and a small bump map loaded on bump options from materials menu I made this example for you.

MacBook Pro

I have this Mac for over one year but I never tried to use headphones to listened music until recent and the big surprise was: zero sound in my ears. After some research on the internet I find the solution: from Applications/Utilities/Audio MIDI Setup.app after you plug in the headphones you must uncheck Channel 1 and 2 from Mute column and this is all.
This was the most stupid thing what I sow on this Mac until now... and without internet help you have no chance to find this stupid setting.

Channel box in Maya

Like I said in the past I have some experience in 3D CAD design where the dimensions and constraints were everything. At the beginning in Maya I was lost, but I found very quick a good help and I am speaking about channel box.
By default channel box is the place where you can control dimensions, rotations, movements and other proprieties for every object from the scene. Later I found the control part of channel box, which is the place were you can have full control for any proprieties you want.

From here you can display or hide proprieties  and if the proprieties are displayed you can lock or unlock them for future modifications.
Channel box together with outliner and some shortcuts will be your day by day instruments for work and used together channel box and outliner will be your main help for debugging.

Lights in Maya

Maybe you know or maybe not in Maya we have 6 official types of lights: ambient, directional, point, spot, area and volume and one additional light source: any material with incandescence greater than 0.
I already read a lot documentation about all those light types but I never find them together in the same picture to see differences between them, so I decided to do this myself.
I made this scene

with all lights available from Maya, every light source is linked with one objects group

and in this way light will affect only those objects. For incandescent light I made a box to surround those objects to keep the light inside and from shape attribute I chose to make that box invisible for render.

 All lights are at the same highs and at the same distance from linked objects. All lights have the same intensity set on 2 except  incandescent light source where I set incandescence to 100 (you can do that from channels when the material is selected in hypershade). All lights have the same settings for ray trace shadow except volume light where we don't have those settings and incandescent material source which is not defined as a true light. All lights have no decay rate set, spot, directional and area lights are set to 45 degree from horizontal, all materials are standard lambert and all shapes are standard shapes, spheres have the same numbers of subdivisions, all boxes have no bevel.
Below you can see the difference between the lights, you can see how the same material react at the different type of lights, how each light react at the same intensity and what shadow make each at the same shadow settings.

 And now same scene with each light rendered closer:
1.Ambient light

2.Point light

3.Area light

4.Volume light

5.Spot light

6.Directional light

7. Incandescent material light

Some basic rules in Maya

I made this 3D scene in Maya,

for a Christmas card, and I notice there are some tricks to know when you are working with boolean operation from polygons/mesh/booleans. Working with booleans is simple, first select the children (object what will be modified), pres Shift and select the parent (object what will do the modification) and chose from polygons/mesh/booleans the operation, if you want to make a hole chose: difference.

After the operation is done, you still can modify the dimensions of the objects involved, if you click on outliner (window/outliner) on the initial objects (not on the new shape obtained) and from channels you can do the modification.

 

For more output options when you work with booleans, or if something in not working properly, check the normals for the objects involved and try different settings. To do that, first select the objects and make normals visible from Display/Polygons/Face Normals (if you want to make them invisible repeat this step) and with only one object selected go to polygons Normals/Reverse. Now try different combinations with normals and booleans until you will be happy with your result. Attention, if you want to bevel the objects make this operation before any boolean operation because after that you will have only errors. If you want to modify later some geometry in the resulting shape, is highly recommended to bevel objects first because all faces which are not involved in the booleans operations will be fully editable.

The challenge

I graduated engineering and I have experience in 3D CAD design, I used Solid Edge, SolidWorks and Catia and now I am working in Maya. Transition from 3D CAD design, where everything is very precise, to 3D Maya designs where you have a lot of freedom it is a big challenge.
For you, people, the big challenge is to stay focused because I know my English is in improvement process, right now, but I am sure in time will be better.
I hope to have debates on every post I will write and I will wait to share from your experiences.