Maya Station

How to sample a 3D texture

Sampling the colour values of a pixel on a 2D texture is easy enough in Maya; there is the MEL command 'colorAtPoint', and you can emit particles from a texture and query the RGB values per particle. Sampling a colour value of a 3D texture is not so straightforward, and the approach suggested in the documentation is to bake your 3D texture to an image file and use the aforementioned methods to query colour values on the resulting texture.

In this post, I'll demonstrate how to implement an API function that samples a 3D texture at any given XYZ point, and returns an RGB value.

Is there a maximum resolution for images rendered with mental ray for Maya ?

I've been looking into this recently, and a little research suggests that the size of the frame buffer is an important factor to consider when rendering a high resolution image using mental ray for Maya.

While there are no explicit limits for the resolution parameter, it's important to understand how mental ray caches its frame buffers.

How many shells in a UV set ?

There is currently no MEL command to find the number of shells in a given UV set (I'm pretty sure of it).

Either way, new to Maya 2011 is an API method that identifies which UVs belong to which shell, and the total number of shells for a given UV set, and this post provides a short example of how to roll it into a python script.