MayaMan Tutorial: Reflection and Refraction Blur

This tutorial explains how to render blurred reflections/refractions using MayaMan. An example scene with a reference image can be found in the MayaMan Example Scenes Pack which can be downloaded here

Note, this tutorial assumes a certain level of familiarity with 3D Maya, in particular the ability to create objects, animations and materials i.e. you should be able to build simple Maya scenes.

Before commencing, ensure your RenderMan renderers are correctly installed, and that you have performed a successful MayaMan installation.
Make sure you have enabled raytraced reflections in the Maya Render Globals, and selected a renderer in MayaMan that supports raytracing (eg Entropy).
Now, build a simple test scene consisting of a box and a sphere inside that box. Remove the front side of the box so that you can see the sphere.
Create a material (eg Phong) in HyperShade. Turn the reflectivity right up and reduce the intensity of the diffuse colour of the object. This will make our reflections show up better. Apply this material to the sphere.
Create another material and turn its reflectivity all the way down. Add a texture to the material (eg checker) and then attach the material to the box.
Make a quick test render in both Maya and MayaMan and verify that you have a reflective sphere inside a textured box. If you don't see reflections at this stage, something is wrong with your scene-setup. Make sure you see reflections before continuing.
So, now we have reflections, but how do we make them blurred. The answer is to add a MayaMan Material Attributes Node to the material, and then bring up the Attribute Editor for the material. The MayaMan Attributes Node will contain a section called "Reflections", and here you can enable reflection/refraction blur (a value between 0 and 1), and the number of samples that will be used to evaluate the blur (more samples means better quality, but makes your render a lot slower)
Set the "Reflection Blur" parameter to 0.2 and the "Reflection Samples" to 3. Leave the other parameters with their default values.
Do a MayaMan preview. The reflections should now show up blurred, but rather noisy. You will have to increase the samples in order to reduce the noise, but be prepared to wait a bit longer for the render to finish.
Blurred refractions are done in the same way, but you have to make the material transparent and enable refractions on the material.
Done. If you had any problems/difficulties completing this tutorial, or have suggestions on how to make the tutorial better, or even suggestions for other tutorials, please email support@al.com.au

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