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Fot this tutorial open the Maya scene, dragon.ma. 
(Where are the tutorial files?) 

In this tutorial we will take a look at ray-traced reflections and refractions. Most familiar ray tracing operations are easy to set up with RenderMan for Maya. For instance, basic ray-traced reflections, refractions, and shadows can be created using the standard Maya methods. Other advanced ray tracing effects, like Global Illumination, require special RenderMan workflows.

Open up the Maya scene, dragon.ma. This scene is simple, with a subdivision surface dragon and a NURBS plane inside a polygonal “Cornell Box”, a couple of Maya Materials, and a couple of lights. The scene should look something like this:

Maya Scene

First things first: if you look at the Maya materials and what they have been attached to, you might notice that there's not much to reflect and/or refract in this scene. That's easily fixed, of course. Select the “Grid” material (it's just a Lambert) and let's map a simple image of a grid to the color. The image is located in the sourceimages folder of the rfm_project (~/rfm_project/sourceimages/grid.tif).

First we'll add ray-traced reflections to the model. The first step is enabling ray tracing, which is done via the Render Globals. Open the Render Globals and select the Features tab, then click the Ray Tracing box in the Ray Tracing section to enable ray tracing.

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RenderMan is a hybrid scanline renderer which has an advanced ray tracing sub-system. Enabling ray-traced effects requires more memory resources than pure scanline rendering. Generally ray tracing should be used when these effects are absolutely necessary and cannot be created (faked) in another way.

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Next we'll create a ray-traced chrome material. Start by assigning a new Blinn to the dragon. Set your Blinn color to something kinda chromey (or brassy, depending on your metallic preferences). You can leave the specular settings at their default levels, except the Reflectivity, which you should crank all the way up to 1.00. Some folks like to match the specular color to the material color, but we wouldn't force your hand. Then pull back on the Diffuse, all the way, if you're so inclined.

Render! Your rendered image should bear some resemblance to the image below:

Ray-traced Reflections

That's the basic approach, but RenderMan for Maya provides some added control over your ray-traced reflections. Go back to your Blinn in the Attribute Editor, then go to the Attributes menu and select RenderMan-> Add Reflection Controls. This will create a new section of “Extra RenderMan Attributes” that give you control over the quality and appearance of your reflections.

First thing we do, let's get in closer to get a better look at the reflections, then let's increase the Reflection Samples to improve the overall quality of the ray-traced reflections. “6” seems like as good a place to start as any. Rerender, and note the pleasant improvement in the image. Mmm, crispy …

Ray-traced Reflections; Reflection Samples: 6

Perhaps, in fact, that's a bit too crisp for us. Luckily, we can play with the reflection blur, too. Crank that Blur setting all the way to 1.000 and rerender. Those edges have softened up quite a bit now.

Ray-traced Reflections; Blur: 1

RenderMan for Maya also gives you two ways to limit what you see in your reflections: you can create a Maya set and specify it, or you can manipulate the Reflection Max Dist parameter. Our scene's a bit simple to warrant using a Maya set, but let's play with the Max Dist. It's set by default to something like a bazillion; let's lower that to “2”, and rerender. Only elements of the scene within 2 units of our reflective surface will be visible in our reflections, see:

Ray-traced Reflections; Reflection Max Dist: 2

The blue from the Cornell Box is no longer visible, and we cannot see the grid at the higher points of the dragon.

Light refracts through transparent surfaces, such as glass. Ray tracing allows you to re-create this effect with ease. In fact, ray-traced refractions are just a couple of simple tweaks to the Blinn material in the scene we've been working with.

First things first: let's reposition our camera to get a better view of the refractions, up and to the right a bit, so that we're looking down at the grid, through the dragon.

Next, open the Attribute Editor for our Blinn. Typically we are told to change our Color attribute to Black for a glass-like material, but we're also going to spike the Transparency, dragging that slider all the way to the right, so go figure … For now, go ahead and drag the Color slider all the way to the left and the Transparency slider all the way to the right.

In the Raytrace Options, check the Refractions checkbox, thereby enabling refractions. In the “real world” glass has a refractive index 'round about 1.5, crystal 'round about 2.0. For our purposes, a crystal dragon will do a slightly better job of showing off the effect, so go ahead and increase the Refractive Index to 2.000. And, what the heck, since we're splurging on crystal, we might as well make it heavy crystal — go ahead crank the Surface Thickness up to 1.000.

Do that rendering thing again, and you should have something that looks like this:

Ray-traced Refractions

Pretty neat, eh?

Once again, you can Add Refraction Controls the same way you added Reflection Controls. Feel free to play with the various parameters to see their effect. Note the correlation between speed and quality, and keep that in mind as you work on your own projects.

Ray-traced Refractions; Refraction Samples: 6 and Blur: 1

As we've seen in these two simple exercises, ray tracing with RenderMan for Maya is fast and easy. Once you're comfortable, check out the RenderMan for Maya tutorial on Global Illumination. Here's more information about Reflections and Refractions.

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