Maya Hypershade for Gaming

[Jido]

I come from training for film and TV in Maya, but I would rather do games. Well, I'm having problems with the High Quality / Hardware Renderer. Blinn and PhongE have the best results, but some of their attributes do not reflect any changes. And I get this wierd inside-out translucency when I use a alpha transparancy map (polygon transparency sorting option doesn't help much at all). I looked into CgFX and FX Composer, but right off the bat, Maya (8.0) is not loading any of the samples that come with Composer.

I would like to work with these maps on the regular:
Color, Diffuse, Specularity(Gloss), Specular Color, Normal, Transparency, and Reflectivity

I have a GeForce 6200 and learned that PSD Networks don't work well. I'm proficient in ActionScript, but unless learning Cg is a glaring solution, I'd like to avoid programming for right now.

If anyone has any insight or links to any tutorials, I'd appreciate it very much.

[Wahlgren]

I read somewhere on cgtalk that the translucency issue is due to nvidia "messing up" their drivers so the gamers out there can get better performance in their games. Alot of people have tried different things and it seems that the results are random.

Try setting hardware texturing to combined instead of color in your material. I´ve heard about that but it certainly didn´t work for me.

A driver change might help but I haven´t tried this myself. I suffer from this same problem and haven´t found any solutions that have worked for me so I can´t really help you out. Sorry.


Yeah mental ray seems to dislike psd-files. Quiet a hassle actually.


EDIT: here´s the thread. It might help you. If you do a search for hardware +transparency issue you'll see that there´s alot of people having these issues.

Longlong link (http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=7&t=128410&highlight=viewport+transparency+maya+issue)

[Jido]

Thanks for the long link Oink. I didn't find a specific answer to my issue, but the thread made it obvious that the root is somewhere in the drivers. I simply rolled back my drivers, and reinstalled the latest ones. The transparency looked fine (I couldn't do anything to make it rear its ugly head, unlike previous fix attempts). Hopefully, it won't flip-out anytime soon.

[Jido]

:brick: I knew it would come back. The very moment I added a new node in my hypershade network and refreshed. It's kinda tolerable in the viewport, It wouldn't be so bad if it didn't show in the hardware renderings. So far, it seems that using, at least for me, CgFX Shaders is the only solution.

[Jido]

Well, I was about to start new thread, but this post is related to my original thread

So what prevented my Extreme Makeover?
http://expo.godsphoenix.com/d/62-1/bricks_issue.jpg

All I wanted was a little alpha for the beard, and the one on the right is what I get. Apparently front-faced polygons behind other front-faced polygons of the same object are blended together. I was hoping learning CgFX would solve the problem. FX gives better results in specularity than with blinn, but the transparency issue remains in the viewports and in hardware renders. No problem with Mental Ray or Software Render (I know the normals map trick). But neither of those are real-time.

So those of you who've encountered this, is there a solution to this that I have yet to find or do you have another tool in your pipeline for rendering real-time images for the comps?

[Vailias]

There is a solution: Split off the alphaed polygons to their own material.

also I've updated my CGFX shader slightly and included an example file Here (http://vailias.com/files/Vailias_GameShader_08-23-07.zip)

There is a trick to getting transparency with a CGFX shader. You must assign a vertex color to your model that has an alpha value of less than one.
Edit Polygons ->Colors ->Apply Color[] This may help with the normal alpha issues as well. Its some weird tick in maya's render pipe.

[Jonny3D]

Any Idea why I always get an error when trying to load any cgfx shaders, my maya crash, tried with both Maya Unlimited 8 and 8.5 and I have a same probleme. Some Fatal Error saving in a certain path of some kind that I've not setup! Any Ideas?