Mental Ray gone nutty

[zhenka22]

Hey guys

Was just working on a scene and rtying out some different settings for the caustics. Anyway, went back to the software render for like 10 minutes to use the IPR to adjust something. Switched back to mental ray and its not working.

In the script editor for all textures and materials it says that the subformat is unsupported and nothing comes up at all. All my textures are Tiffs.

Tried restarting Maya but no luck. Went into a different scene and same story.

Where to go from here?

[zhenka22]

My bad, guys, I should have searched the forum more closely.

I did not realize that Mental Ray doesn't support tiffs. A bit of a pain in the ass but nothing deadly. What formats do you guys recommend for stuff like photographic textures and greyscale maps etc...Do targas work fine?

Cheers

[DjVoyager]

Targas work, but sometimes not with transparencies. I'd recommend PNG.

[zhenka22]

Thanks man. Will give that a crack!

[Nojoy]

If you're software supports IFF i would go with those. It's maya's native file format. A Nice trick about iff's is that you can adjust the blur manually afterward through the command prompt of your pc without re rendering the entire shot. A trick kyle showed us a while back on one of the DT insider CD's. ;)

[zhenka22]

hmmm, I am creating the texture maps in Photoshop, compositing in After Effects and editing in Premier. Does AE or Photoshop support iff sequences?

[laxman]

yes they do, but sometimes it doesn't work for some reason. I would just render .tga

[DjVoyager]

You'd have to download the free iff plugin for PS or AE to import them correctly. It's just one file basically that you manually have to put into Photoshop's plugin folder.

[Nojoy]

You copy it to the plugins -> file formats folder, it comes with a txt message where to put it manually, it should also already be located on the photoshop install cd under extras i beleive it was, after that import is a breeze :)

Incase I still prefer other file formats instead of iff I usually use fcheck to resave my animation to another format such as tga or tiff, it shoots them out rather quick and nicley without much input hassle, therefore I always tend to use iff. I guess a choice of preference and as long as you end up with what you need to get paid or satisfied should do the job. This is just one of the way's I handle files usually.