Recently, I upgraded from Alias Maya 7 Complete to Autodesk Maya 2009 Unlimited at work.   For anyone who hasn’t used Maya 7 vs. Maya 2009, the differences are worlds apart. Fortunately Autodesk allows an “at home license” which means that I can learn the new features of Maya 2009 at home when I have time.   While this is very cool for me, this benefits you because I’ve decided to finally start giving back to the CG community with the release of my very first shaders setup.

Throughout my career I’ve downloaded tons of shaders from sites like Highend3d to dissect them and learn how others create various looks within Maya, but I’ve never really released any of the shaders that I’ve create.   Not really sure why, but that is neither here nor there since we can’t change the past.

What’s Included
The title of the first scene is “dL_metalShaders”.   There are two types of metal shaders, both utilizing the new-to-Maya 2009-shader mia_material_x_passes so you can use these shaders with the awesome new Maya passes feature. The two types of metal currently in this scene are:

• Brushed Metal
• Generic (polished) metal

As time allows, I’ll add different types of metal to this project and re-release it under a new version number.  Let me know if there’s a specific type of metal you’re looking for and I’ll consider it as an option.   Eventually, I’d like to branch into non-metallic surfaces, but for now I’m sticking with metal because its what I deal with all day long at work so its what I know best.

Instead of releasing the shaders themselves, I’ve decided to release the entire Maya project.   So many times I’ve downloaded a shader, imported it and hit “render” and the result looked absolutely nothing like what the sample looked like.   By releasing the entire project, you should be able to open the scene file and hit “render” and get a result that looks exactly like the sample above.

So, what do I do first?
The first step is to download the file.  You can find the link at the bottom of this post.   Once you’ve done that, extract the .zip file somewhere on your hard drive.   Open the “scenes” folder and open “dL_metalShaders.ma” in Maya.  Its that simple!   Go into the Hypershade to take a look at the shaders themselves and export them to their own scene files for use in your project, etc.

Please note that these metal shaders are built using the mia_material_x_passes shader. Not all of my shaders in the future will be built with this shader…but for now, this version of dL_metalShaders is built for taking advantage of the extremely powerful new render passes feature of Maya 2009.  This means that they are not compatible with any version of Maya before Maya 2009.

Download Here

View v0.0.2 update here!