From the course: Maya: Bifrost Extension

Assigning a material reference from Maya - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Maya: Bifrost Extension

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Assigning a material reference from Maya

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- [Instructor] Assigning materials in Bifrost can be done in numerous ways. In the previous movie, we saw how to assign a material to a Bifrost shape that has been converted to a Maya shape, and that's just done in the usual way that you would assign a material to any object in Maya. If you plan to render the Bifrost shape directly, however, you'll need to make the material assignment within the Bifrost Graph. In this movie, we'll see how to assign a material that already exists in the Hypershade. So let's open up that Hypershade, and I've got a blinn1 material available in here, and we want to drag that into the Bifrost Graph. So select the Bifrost Graph in the outliner, and open up that graph from the Windows menu. All we need to do is just middle-mouse drag the material into the graph, and this creates a material reference node, so if we select that node, we can see that it's pointing at a material name called blinn1. To assign that to our output, we need a material assign node. So click in the graph, press the tab key, and type in material, and we'll see assign material. And we need to wire this up. Connect the final output of our height displacement node, to the geometry input of the assign material node. Connect the output of the material reference to the surface material input on that assign material node. With that node selected, we can see that we have the ability to set a surface, displacement, or volume material, just like we would in a Maya shading group. Take the output of that assign material node, and connect it to the Bifrost Graph output. And that's all there is to that, we can minimize these windows, and now we've got that blinn material assigned to the Bifrost shape. And that will render just perfectly in Arnold, but again, as we saw in the previous movie, if we try to render the Bifrost shape in another renderer, we may run into some limitations. That's how to reference a Hypershade material into the Bifrost Graph.

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