From the course: Maya: Advanced Materials

Graphing networks - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Maya: Advanced Materials

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Graphing networks

- [Instructor] Maya is very powerful and flexible. However, sometimes the Maya interface can be problematic and I've been using Maya for 20 years and I've always said, if you can just see it and select it, you're halfway there and that applies to the hypershade probably more than anywhere else in Maya. Unfortunately, the hypershade window as of Maya 2020 still has a number of issues and bugs and I'm going to try to help you sort through all that. So, first of all, let's talk about graphing shader networks. I've got my browser docked back onto the hypershade window once again, if we select a material node such as dancer STSF, we can graph all of it's connected nodes by clicking on the button input and output connections on the graph toolbar. Click that button and we should see all of the nodes connected to that material and it should be auto arranged so that everything is nice and clean. By default, Additive Graphing is enabled and that means if we graph some other shading network it will be dropped into the current graph. If we right-click in the graph from the Marking menu, we can see Additive Graphing mode is on. So now let's graph another material, select parquet STSF once again click input and output connections all those nodes got dropped onto the existing ones. And by the way very importantly, commands to change the display of the graph itself are not undoable. The undo command will only respect the selection of nodes and changes to their attribute values. So I can't just hit undo and clear out the last display command that I've done here. We could try to rearrange the graph if we click on that button, that might work in your case but in my case because of the small size of my screen, I was not able to re-arrange the graph. However I can select and move a bunch of connected nodes all at once. If we select a single node, we have some commands to select the upstream and downstream nodes and that can be done from the Marking menu once again. You can right-click and choose select items in stream, select upstream, select downstream or select upstream and downstream and once you've done that, then you can move all those as a unit. You probably don't want to use that Marking menu there's a hotkey for that. Select a node and to select all of its upstream and downstream nodes, use the slash key on your keyboard. So that selects all of them. If you just want to select the upstream nodes that's the comma key on the keyboard. If you want to select the downstream nodes, it's the period key. Okay once I've arranged this, I can try rearranging once again and we can see that this time because I had manually moved those nodes over the graph actually rearranged properly this time. Let's talk about framing selections. If you select some node and press the F key on the keyboard, then hypershade will frame the selected node. However, this is a global hotkey and its behavior is different in the hypershade than it is in other parts of Maya. So for example, if we go over to our viewport and select nothing and press the F key, it will actually frame everything in the view. However, if you select nothing in the hypershade and press the F key, nothing happens. Additionally, in the hypershade, there is no hotkey to frame all. You have to select everything and then press the F key. There are also no hotkeys to re-arrange the graph. There's no hotkeys to change the size of swatches and these are all things that you'll need to do all the time. In the next movie, I'll show you how to bind some hotkeys in order to get access to those commonly needed commands through the keyboard. That's a bit about how to graph networks using hypershade.

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