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Upgrading to Arnold 4.1.x
Arnold 4.1.x has plenty of new features and improvements, and you can read about those in the release notes. Here’s a few other little things to know about Arnold 4.1.x: All shaders, procedurals, and...
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[MtoA] [SItoA] Setting multiple Arnold parameters with the User Options
If you need to set multiple parameters in the User Options, you can use whitespace (spaces, tabs, and newlines) as delimiters to separate parameter statements. For example: enable_procedural_cache off...
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Entry point not found
An Entry Point Not Found error message might look rather weird (because you’re looking at the decorated name of a function). but usually such an error just means that the wrong version of a DLL (in...
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[MtoA] Installing MtoA 1.0.0 on Linux
A few notes: You need root permissions to do the automatic installation. Use sudo, not su. You want to install MtoA under your user account, not the root user account. sudo will let you install MtoA...
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Setting the number of samples
This short (under two minutes) video looks at the values you enter in the Arnold sampling controls, and how they determine the actual number of samples.
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[MtoA] Deadline and MtoA 1.0.x
Recently I discovered that Deadline 6 doesn’t work with MtoA 1.0.x, and it’s because of a change to the MtoA verbosity levels controls in the Render Settings UI. I think an update for Deadline will...
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Installing MtoA on Mac OS X
A quick walk through of how to run the MtoA installer on Mac OS X.
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Object color mode
The Arnold Utility shader has an Object color mode, which assigns colors based on shape names. When we say “shapes”, we don’t mean Maya shape nodes; we mean the Arnold shapes....
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[MtoA] Scripting Standin paths
To set a standin path, use the aiStandin.dso attribute: import maya.cmds as cmds cmds.setAttr( 'ArnoldStandInShape.dso','C:/Users/SOLIDANGLE/Documents/BlueDog.ass', type='string' ) print cmds.getAttr(...
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[MtoA] Installing custom shaders
So, you’ve downloaded some custom shaders and you want to get them into Maya? Here’s how: Set ARNOLD_PLUGIN_PATH to point to the location of the shader DLL/SO and MTD files. Set MTOA_TEMPLATES_PATH to...
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[MtoA] [Scripting] Setting the output image format
Settings like the image format and compression come from the defaultArnoldDriver node, so to set them through scripting, you need to set defaultArnoldDriver attributes. The image format corresponds to...
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[Arnold] [MtoA] Disabling Skip License Check
If you render a scene that has Skip License Check enabled, you’ll get the Arnold watermark. One way to make sure this doesn’t happen is to turn off Skip License Check from the command line: render -r...
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[Linux] Missing .sog files?
Sometimes on Linux you may get “unable to load dynamic library” errors for .sog files. Like this: 00:00:00 0MB WARNING | unable to load dynamic library:...
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Loading MtoA in mayapy
Over on my support.solidangle.com blog, I talk about why you get API errors (kFailure): Unexpected Internal Failure Error: Failed to open python module ‘arnold’ crashes or segmentation faults when you...
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[MtoA] [SItoA] Distance between shading with Vector State
SItoA includes Arnold versions of the Softimage Vector State and Vector Scalar shaders, which you can use to do build a “distance between” shading network. Vector State can get you the origin point of...
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[MtoA] Installing the BA shaders in Maya
You can use the BA shaders in Maya with MtoA. The BA shaders are Arnold shaders, so you can use them anywhere that you use Arnold. Here’s how: Download the Maya mental ray package of the BA shaders....
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[MtoA] One mtoa.mod to rule them all
After a few tries, I got one mtoa.mod file that works for multiple Maya versions: + MAYAVERSION:2015 mtoa any C:\solidangle\mtoadeploy\2015 PATH +:= bin + MAYAVERSION:2014 mtoa any...
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[MtoA] Pimping your Yeti module file
Here’s a variation of the Yeti module file that adds the bin folder to the PATH, and plug-ins to MTOA_EXTENSIONS_PATH: + pgYetiMaya any C:\solidangle\yeti\Yeti-v1.3.14_Maya2014-windows64 PATH +:= bin...
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[MtoA] [MacOSX] Rendering a sequence
Here’s a question submitted through solidangle.com: how do I render a sequence of frames with Maya on Mac OS X? The answer is: the same way you would a sequence of frames with mental ray in Maya. In...
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[MtoA] The case of the scene that crashed Maya
In this case, Maya crashed as soon as you loaded a certain scene. What was the problem? Yeti couldn’t get a license, and then when MtoA loaded the Yeti procedural, that was it: crash. We found the...
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