Maya Texturing for Aqsis

Liquid can take advantage of Maya's UV editor and Texture Projection options to help align textured shaders. First you will need a shader that supports texture placement. The following is a simple shader that has some lighting, and a texture parameter.

 
surface texturedShader( string texturename = ""; float Kd = 1 ) {
 
  normal    n = normalize(N);
  normal    nf = n;
  nf = faceforward(n, I);
  color    diffusecolor = Kd * diffuse(nf);
    Oi = Os;
    Ci = Os * texture (texturename) * diffusecolor;
 
}

• Compile the sl code with aqsl.

• Open Maya and create some geometry.

• Assign a Liquid Surface shader to the geometry.

• Assign an Aqsis .slx shader to the Liquid Surface SHD node.

Note that the shader now has a Parameter called texturename. Here you can add a .tif shader (It does not HAVE to be a precompiled aqsis texture, a standard TIFF will work).

Depending on the version of Maya that you are running (it appears Liquid for Maya 8 and onwards), you may have the option of using the Preview > OpenGl feature. This enables you to swap out a proxy texture in the viewport, to help visualise texture placement. To select a proxy texture, click the Input box next to the GL Texture swatch, and map a file the same way you would for Maya's software renderer, or Mental Ray.

Dont choose a texture size too large. It might look nice in the viewport, but can cause viewport manipulation to really bog down.

UV points can be manipulated the same way as they are normally in maya, via the UV texture editor. One important point to note is that the texture does not repeat beyond the 0-1 UV space. Any UV points falling outside the texture space will not render.

will produce