Half year project Ink'n paint vs. mr lighting

One of the problems we encountered during this project was an incompatibility between ink’n paint and mr lighting. Ink’n paint those work with mental ray, but in a different way and to get similar results you do need to make several modifications to your materials.

What mr lighting caused was that the paint levels did not show up and made all of the objects to be really smooth looking, it also removed the few bump materials that we have in our scenes.

To fix the problems we discussed changing out our mental ray omnis with normal omnis and same with other mr lights, but I also discovered another way of fixing the problems.

Material to shader is a connection from normal materials to different shaders and has the shaders as for instance the diffuse color of the materials. So now the lighting would not interact directly with the ink’n’ paint, but the standard material we used instead, something which solved another issue with ink’n paint were you need light maps or other complicated settings to make lighting effect the diffuse color of the objects with ink’n paint, and now the light hits the standard material first and can so effect the diffuse color with the color of the light. We were also able to put the bump material directly to the standard material and it would work with mr lighting.

 

But in the end we ended up changing all the lights till other kinds of lights, material to shader solved the big problems that we had with mr lighting, but the overall visual style go changed  still now that we used material to shader, for instance the paint levels had difficulties showing up.

Here’s a link to one of the few helpful (free) sites on the ink’n paint vs. mental ray lighting:

Link to help