MayaMan Overview

You may be curious about how MayaMan works. This page outlines the major steps involved, so that you can understand what is happening, and how to make better use of MayaMan in your production pipeline.

MayaMan 'Nugget'

When using MayaMan, you may notice that a node is created named 'MayaManNugget'. This node is used to store all the MayaMan global settings. If you are writing a MEL script that needs to modify MayaMan's behaviour, you can simply set the values attached to this object. Modifying these attributes requires a MayaMan license.

RIB File Creation

The RenderMan Interface Bytestream (RIB) is used by all RenderMan compatible renderers, and is a scene description format. The RIB files created by MayaMan contain all the information about your scene's geometry, lights and camera, as well as options and attributes specifying all parameters needed to render your image.

There are tools available to generate RIB files from most 3D applications, but most do not attempt to capture as much of your scene as MayaMan will.

RenderMan Shader Creation

MayaMan analyses the materials you have assigned to the objects in your scene, and attempts to write a RenderMan shader for each one that will emulate the Maya material hierarchy. For each node in your Hypergraph layout (e.g. file, checker, etc) MayaMan will insert a block of code into a shader source file. When the shader source file has been created, MayaMan will then call the appropriate shader compiler command to produce the shader file ready for use.

Texture Conversion

Maya allows you to apply texture files in a variety of different formats. However, most RenderMan renderers can only use textures in a particular format. MayaMan will take the texture files applied in Maya, and convert them into the correct format for you, placing them in a 'texture cache'. As texture conversion can be a very lengthy process, these converted textures are reused by default, but will be automatically regenerated if MayaMan sees that the original texture file has been updated.

Generation of Shadow and Reflection Map RIB Files

If shadows maps are enabled, then MayaMan will write out a RIB file for each light casting shadows in your scene. Similarly, if your materials require reflection maps, these will also be automatically generated. Options exist for reusing shadow and reflection maps

Render Execution

Finally, when all the RIB files and shaders are written, MayaMan will execute the shadow/reflection map renders, then the main render. Depending on the parameters set in the MayaMan Globals dialog, an image file will be written out, or the image result displayed in a new window, or both. Options also exist for writing out the RIB files without executing the render, or passing the render onto an Alfred server.

MayaMan will write out a script file (.sh or .bat) with all the execution commands, and will execute this script file to actually perform the render. This also makes rendering these files easy through any rendering farm setup.

MayaMan Help Contents