File conversion

[gilmog1]

I have a question about my files. A friend and i are working on a Maya project together, Ive been in the fortunate position to aquire Maya 8 through my place of employment but he has Maya 7, Ive been working on some things and wanted to pass them on to my friend but his Maya 7 will not load my files saying there unrecognised. Is there any easy way around this or do we have to synch in versions of the software?

Thanks

Graham

[barryk50]

Whenever you save a scene in Maya 8 save it as an ascii file. Once this is saved, open up the file in a text editor. After the file is open find all the places where is says Maya 8 and change it to Maya 7. Save and reopen in Maya 7.

[gilmog1]

Ok so i have the file into Maya 7 now but the shader information is all wrong, drive paths being different and all so ive deleted all shader info for now and am going to start that again as a test, Now though when i add the MR shader - MI_car_paint_phen to my model it goes Dark green (the true color i assume is only shown in Maya 8) and when i try and render it in mental ray that polygon isnt rendered at all, Its missing from the render. Any ideas here, Im assuming theres still some shader information still in the ascii file that came over from Maya 8 thats causing this. Is there a way i can clean up the scene file to remove all but the geometry? if i can im going to get me and my colleauge sticking to Maya 7 to finish this one off.. any ideas, theanks for all your help so far..

[barryk50]

one idea is to export your shader and then importing it into maya 7. Im not sure if you would have to save it as an .ascii file or not, you would just have to try and see. The reason your object turned dark green and didnt render is because the shader on there wasnt supported by the render or the shader was deleted from the object. This would be the case if you applied a mental ray shader and then tried to render it in maya software. Mental ray shaders only work in Mental Ray. I would say try and export the sh

[gilmog1]

Hi, im not too worried about the shaders as i said because i havent really started to work on them fully yet, I was more concerned about getting the geometry moved over first and starting the shaders again as its all good excersises and helps me practice getting this stuff down. My concern was the shader i applied in Maya 7 which is the "MI_car_paint_phen " wasnt showing up when i rendered it in Mental ray, all i can think is that there is still some Maya 8 information in my scene file somewhere stopping this from rendering. When i say it wasnt showing up in the render i mean the actual physical polygons i applied the shader too had dissapeared completely like they were invisible. Is there any way to clean up the scene file or strip out anything remotly relating to Maya 8.

Thanks for your replies :)

[Jak_Carver]

just recreate the shader while your in Maya 7 and that should solve the problem.

[gilmog1]

Thats just it, the shader im using in maya 7 is the standard MI_car_paint_phen in the mental rays shaders, im not even modifying it im just using it stock from the hypershade and in mental ray the polygon disappears.. can you recreate the included Mental ray shaders from scratch? if i try using the standard mental ray metallic car shader it works fine and displays, so far it only seems to be this shader causing me problems

[Jak_Carver]

Thats just it, the shader im using in maya 7 is the standard MI_car_paint_phen in the mental rays shaders, im not even modifying it im just using it stock from the hypershade and in mental ray the polygon disappears.. can you recreate the included Mental ray shaders from scratch? if i try using the standard mental ray metallic car shader it works fine and displays, so far it only seems to be this shader causing me problems



Sorry dont quite understand, from your post above I think you said that when you use the MI_car_paint_phen it doesnt work but then you said that when you do use the metallic car shader it does work?...

[gilmog1]

Yea, possibly that didnt sound right to anyone outside my head ;)

if you go into Mental Ray materials theres 2 different ones that can be used for cars.

1. mi_car_paint_phen - and
2. mi_metallic_paint

Now if i just open Maya and do nothing else but select a new shader (1.) in hypershade i get this -

====================================
sets -renderable true -noSurfaceShader true -empty -name mi_car_paint_phen1SG;
// Result: mi_car_paint_phen1SG //
connectAttr mi_car_paint_phen1.message mi_car_paint_phen1SG.miMaterialShader;
// Result: Connected mi_car_paint_phen1.message to mi_car_paint_phen1SG.miMaterialShader //
// Error: (Mayatomr.Nodes) : could not find a mentalrayGlobals node //
select -r mi_car_paint_phen1 ;
select -cl ;
====================================

And when i try rendering this shader on any object in Mental Ray(yes it is turned on ;) ) i can see nothing in the render result.

Thats basically the sum of it. nothing more. the car file ive exported from Maya 8 doesnt even come into this. but...

If i use shader (2.) the mi_metallic_pint then this works and renders perfectly. the metallic one isnt as nice as the paint_phen one because it doesnt have the nice pearlescent shine to it :(

theres something fundamentally wrong somehwere here. ive completely de-installed and re-installed maya to no avail. am i missing something obvious??

Thanks

[gilmog1]

Update: // Error: (Mayatomr.Nodes) : could not find a mentalrayGlobals node //

This error only appeared because i didnt select mental ray globals before the shader so that can be ignored