3.2 The Assignment Panel
| 3.2.1 Assignment Panel Overview | ||
| 3.2.2 Assignment Panel Components |
3.2.1 Assignment Panel Overview
The assignment panel is a handy interface for inspecting and modifying shader and attribute connections. This panel doesn't provide more functionalities than the relationship editor (see section The 3Delight Relationship Editor) but it has a couple nice properties:
- It is "dockable".
- It takes less screen estate.
Usage is very simple: selecting a Maya object updates the panel's content to show current assignments; all modifications performed through the panel will be applied to the selected object. Obviously, this interface is doesn't provide a global overview of the different connections as in the case with the relationship editor.
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3.2.2 Assignment Panel Components
Follow additional explanations for each column in the panel:
- Object assignments
- This is the traditional object-level assignment scheme.
- Collections assignments
- Those are connection that are active on the collection level. They will be activated if the rendered pass selects this collection. Please refer to Understanding Collections for more information.
- Override assignments
- Override shaders are mainly useful for passes that need the same shader to be attached on all geometry. Say you have an ambient occlusion pass, as in the example above, with all objects having the same shader. Simply declare a collection, assign an ambient occlusion shader to it and select the collection in the "Render Sets" section of the render pass. No further shader assignment is needed, when rendering the pass all objects will have the ambient occlusion shader automatically attached to them.
Additionally:
- Clicking on the "texture" square near the shader will open the "Shader Selector" to list shader files of the relevant type. Once a file is selected, a shader node is created and assigned to the currently selected objects. See The Shader Selector.
- Clicking on AE will show shaders parameter in Maya's attribute editor. Some customization of a given shader's gadgets is possible; see Shader Node Attribute Grouping.
- Attribute Nodes can be created and assigned in this panel.
- Other shader types (such as atmosphere and interior) can be shown in this panel by enabling them in the "Show" menu.
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