mr's equivalent to maya's 'luminance'

[ronviers]

Anyone know mental ray's equivalent to maya's 'luminance' node?

Thanks:)

[Mika]

Welcome.

You are so fast...

Why not use the luminance node in mr?

BTW: Here in Germany it´s early in the morning..

[ronviers]

As a way to understand mr I have been taking things I have working in maya and converting them to their mr counterparts.

[haggi]

You can use almost all maya nodes in the hypershade to create your shading network. Internally all shaders are converted automatically to mentalray nodes during scene translation.

[ronviers]

Is that to say that where maya and mental ray have redundant nodes, mental images does not include their equivalent nodes in favor of maya’s nodes? I can see how this would avoid confusion. Somehow I got the impression that mental ray, even as a plugin inside maya, was capable of working independently.

Thank you:)

[ronviers]

However this exercise has made it clear that I have a misunderstanding of mr nodes. For example, with the mib_color_spread (set to weighted intensity) or mib_color_average, I expect to get a ‘value’ output, but they appear to have only ‘rgb’ output. Even the icon for the mib_color_average node, in the hypershade selection list, shows a sinlge output. Can someone please reconcile this?

[Mika]

You can export an .mi file and then you can look into that file with an editor...

Edit:

mib_color_average:
Output: Color
Converts a color to RGBA grayscale by averaging the RGB values. The resulting grayscale value can also be used as a scalar. The returned R, G, B, and A components all have the same value.

So, one value is enough


cheers,
mika

[ronviers]

It's great to know about being able to export and edit. I will use that trick a lot.

Thank you for solving the problem! I overlooked that in the manual. I will try to be more careful in the future.

[Mika]

You are welcome to ask more questions...