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.