djx blog

Here are a few tips for anybody using custom mentalray shaders with maya 8.5, especially people who have upgraded from previous versions of maya. If you are like me, you installed the upgrade and jumped right in to see if your favourite custom shaders still worked. You may have had your maya.rayrc file all set up just the way you liked it - I had declarations for over 50 shaders in mine. I keep the custom shader files in a different folder to the ones that came with maya, which made my maya.rayrc even more complicated. Well as of maya 8.5 this all got simpler.

With mentalray for maya 8.5 you nolonger need to customise that maya.rayrc file. You can put your custom shaders anywhere you like, including a shared network folder, so your entire render farm can get the shaders from a single central location. The only thing you need to do is add this line to your Maya.env file (default location is C:\Documents and Settings\david\My Documents\maya\8.5)...

MI_CUSTOM_SHADER_PATH = d:\mentalray\lib;d:\mentalray\include;

Notice how the environment variable is set to two file paths seperated by a semi-colon, which specify the location of the custom dll's AND the mi's. When you open maya you will have access to any shaders that it finds in those folders.