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Arnold shaders not showing up in Assign New Material window
If you’re running Maya 2013 and you don’t see the Arnold shaders in the Assign New Materials window, then you need to install the latest Maya 2013 service pack. After that, you’ll be able to...
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Using the attr token in the texture file name attribute of a File node
In this blog post, I’ll quickly step through an example of how to use the <attr> token in the Maya File node. Add a "mtoa_constant_" attribute to the shape node. Put the name of the texture file...
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[MtoA] Editing Arnold attributes on multiple objects
If you need to change the same Arnold attributes on many nodes, use the Attribute Spreadsheet. For example, suppose you wanted to turn off the Opaque attribute on a number of objects in your scene....
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Switching between different versions of MtoA
If you have several versions of MtoA, you can switch between them by editing your Maya.env and mtoa.mtd files before you start Maya. These two files are located under your MAYA_APP_DIR folder. For...
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Another case of a missing entry point
In this case, a user installed the latest MtoA, but when he went to load mtoa.mll in the Plug-in Manager, he got this error: --------------------------- Settings/Preferences: maya.exe - Entry Point...
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[MtoA] The case of the renderer that failed to register
In this case, a customer running Maya 2013 on Ubuntu reported this error when he tried to load the mtoa plugin: API error detected in plugins/mtoa/Main.cpp at line 710: (kFailure): Unexpected Internal...
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[MtoA] Using standins to load animation sequences
To load an animated sequence into a standin: In the Attribute editor for the StandInShape, under File/Frame, your Path should be something like example.####.ass (you must use four # symbols for the...
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Entry point not found
An Entry Point Not Found error message might look rather weird (because you’re looking at the decorated name of a function). but usually such an error just means that the wrong version of a DLL (in...
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[MtoA] Installing MtoA 1.0.0 on Linux
A few notes: You need root permissions to do the automatic installation. Use sudo, not su. You want to install MtoA under your user account, not the root user account. sudo will let you install MtoA...
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[MtoA] Deadline and MtoA 1.0.x
Recently I discovered that Deadline 6 doesn’t work with MtoA 1.0.x, and it’s because of a change to the MtoA verbosity levels controls in the Render Settings UI. I think an update for Deadline will...
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[MtoA] Scripting Standin paths
To set a standin path, use the aiStandin.dso attribute: import maya.cmds as cmds cmds.setAttr( 'ArnoldStandInShape.dso','C:/Users/SOLIDANGLE/Documents/BlueDog.ass', type='string' ) print cmds.getAttr(...
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[MtoA] One mtoa.mod to rule them all
After a few tries, I got one mtoa.mod file that works for multiple Maya versions: + MAYAVERSION:2015 mtoa any C:\solidangle\mtoadeploy\2015 PATH +:= bin + MAYAVERSION:2014 mtoa any...
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[MtoA] Pimping your Yeti module file
Here’s a variation of the Yeti module file that adds the bin folder to the PATH, and plug-ins to MTOA_EXTENSIONS_PATH: + pgYetiMaya any C:\solidangle\yeti\Yeti-v1.3.14_Maya2014-windows64 PATH +:= bin...
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[MtoA] [MacOSX] Rendering a sequence
Here’s a question submitted through solidangle.com: how do I render a sequence of frames with Maya on Mac OS X? The answer is: the same way you would a sequence of frames with mental ray in Maya. In...
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[MtoA] Command-line compiling with Visual Studio 2010 Express
Open a Visual Studio Command Prompt (Start > All Programs > Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express > Visual Studio Command Prompt) Set up the environment for 64-bit compilation: CALL...
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[MtoA] Mapping textures to Yeti hair
Like MtoA, Yeti exports UV coordinates in the uparamcoord and vparamcoord parameters, and you use these to map textures in the aiHair shader with the Uparam and Vparam extra attributes. For example, if...
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[MtoA] The case of the instant crash when I load MtoA
In this case, Maya 2015 (Windows) disappeared a few seconds after I clicked the MtoA Loaded check box in the Plug-in Manager. Eventually I tracked it down to this line in my pluginPrefs.mel:...
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The case of the missing PyMel debug log file
In several recent cases, I had to figure out why MtoA wouldn’t load on a render farm. The root cause turned out to be the PyMel debug log: ~/pymel.log If PyMel cannot find or open ~/pymel.log, that...
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The case of the “cannot remove alias” RuntimeError
In this case, mayabatch reported some runtime errors when loading a certain scene: # Traceback (most recent call last): # File "C:\solidangle\mtoadeploy\2015\scripts\mtoa\callbacks.py", line 415, in...
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