LayerMatNode

Introduction

• LayerMatNode is a Maya Arnold plugin for rendering surfaces with layered material. With a few shader nodes you can easily create a range of surface appearances with texture-mappable parameters
• The BSDF model is derived from the paper Position-Free Monte Carlo Simulation for Arbitrary Layered BSDFs, Guo Yu et al. and promoted by PBRT as a standard. We further made it a usable tool

Contributors

• Chang Liu, UPenn CGGT
• Gehan Zheng, UPenn CGGT

Demo Video

• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j2lDRicSBbojKYuCwUnV30WpUK_f266z/view?usp=sharing

Setup

Setting environment variables

• ARNOLD_PATH to C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Arnold\maya2023

• ARNOLD_PLUGIN_PATH to your plugin folder, in this case is /plugin of this project

• MTOA_TEMPLATES_PATH the same as ARNOLD_PLUGIN_PATH

• Add %ARNOLD_PATH%\bin to your system's PATH variable

Building plugin

• Clone
• Generate Visual Studio project with CMake
• Build

Loading and testing the plugin

• If environment variables are set properly, then Maya and Arnold will automatically load the plugin

Arnold for Maya development handbook

• https://help.autodesk.com/view/ARNOL/ENU/?guid=arnold_dev_guide_plugins_html