Class 3: MTOR

What is MTOR?

MTOR is a Maya plugin ($$$) which translates Maya scenes (minus Maya shaders) into RIB. Slim, a visual RMan shader creator UI, lets you assign RMan shaders to Maya geometry. MTOR's generated RIB references these Slim-generated shaders (instead of Maya's).

Load the MTOR .so/.mll/.dll file(s) using Maya's 'plugin manager'. This would create a new 'RenderMan' menu under the Maya 'Render' menu bar (where Maya's own rendering menu resides). All RenderMan rendering is handled via items in this RenderMan menu. No need to hand-edit RIB files or shaders!

Be sure to consult the extensive docs on MTOR/Slim on an ongoing basis.

Tour of MTOR, it, etc.

'RenderMan -> Render' is a lot like 'Render -> Render'.

The 'it' driver also caches images, allows zooming in/out, shows individual R/G/B/A channels, allows for 'flipbook' creation, etc.

Quality, etc. settings - the 'RenderMan Globals' tab

• shading rate; example rib
• supersampling, pixel filtering; example rib
• shading interpolation; example rib
• eye splits - no longer an issue starting with PRMan v.12!

Running 'mtor' from the command line

Invocation:
mtor -scene yourscene.ma
% rg camName perspShape
% genRib 5
% render 7
% quit

Or in a single line:
mtor -scene river_water.ma -cmd "rg camName perspShape; render 1"

Notes:

• 'rg' specifies render globals settings
• can create a MEL script and commands/buttons/shortcuts to set low/medium/high etc. quality settings Eg. mtor control setvalue -rg pixelSamples -value "4 4";

MTOR features

There is more to MTOR than Slim (the visual shader interface). Here are things that MTOR facilitates:

• auxiliary buffers - multiple rendered images, ONE pass
• particles - MTOR can export arbitrary user-defined particle attrs
• curves - great for hair/fur, grass..
• subdiv surfaces - in additional to normal subdivs, can also crease edges and sharpen corners
• blobbies - great for fluid droplets
• custom coordinate frames - can be used in a shader 'transform()' call