From the course: Maya: Shader Networks

Duplicating networks

- [Male Voice] I'd like to begin our exploration of Maya shader network essentials by simply duplicating some shading nodes in the hyper shade. Let's first open up the Arnold render view so that we'll get an interactive production rendering of our figure of a dancer statuette here. And as an aside, mostly this course is going to be renderer agnostic, meaning that the techniques you learn will also apply to other renderers, such as V-Ray. Let's open the Arnold render view, click in the camera to viewport to give it focus. And in the main Maya menus, choose Arnold render. In the Arnold render view, we see we have a nice bright gold color on the statuette. You'll see that we have a black background. I've set this scene up with an Arnold Skydome with a high dynamic range image that's providing nice, shiny highlights on the surface of the figure. You'll also see that we have a black background in the Arnold render view, and that's because I've disabled the visibility of camera rays in the Arnold Skydome. And I did that for two reasons. One, so that we're not distracted by any background and two, so that the rendering will complete more quickly because Arnold is not rendering the background. Okay, let's open up the Maya hyper shade window. We can do that from the button on the status line, display hyper shade window. When that launches, we can see that we've got a very stripped down version of hyper shade in which the only panel visible is the graph and I've hidden everything else in this window menu. We're not going to talk much about the hyper shade user interface in this course. I covered a lot of that in the companion course, which is Maya advanced materials, For now, It's enough to know that we just have the graph visible and nothing else. There actually is a material shader network in the graph, but due to some quirks in the Maya hyper shade, you may not be able to see that. It may be too small or off the window, so you can click on rearrange graph and we can see we've got a very simple shading network here. I'll zoom in a little bit with Alton right mouse button. I've got a gold standard surface material and its base color weight is being modulated by a file node. And I know that's a file node because it's got a dot PNG extension here. As another aside, we can display different things in the title of the nodes, using the five hot key. If I click to select nothing and press the five key, I can switch between different display modes. We can see the type of node we press five again, we can hide all those titles. Press five again, and we'll see the node name or in the case of a file, we see the file to which that node refers. All right, let's duplicate some stuff. So if we select a node or nodes and we can navigate again with alt and middle mouse button, I have selected the two D texture placement node, as well as that file node. And I can duplicate those in the usual way with the Maya keyboard shortcut control D. But if you do it that way, you don't preserve any connections. We have two separate nodes here and they're not connected. So let's do it a different way. I'll select those and delete those with the delete key. If you select any node, you can duplicate its entire upstream network from the hyper shade menu. We can go into hyper shade menu and choose edit duplicate shading network. And now we get a new file node and a new place 2D texture node. And all those connections have been preserved. I've actually combined the connections here and we can reveal those if we want. I'll select both of those and press the two key on the keyboard to display all the connections. So we didn't have to manually create all those connections. We did it automatically using that duplicate command. Alright, I'll delete those again with a delete key. The other thing you'll want to do a lot is to create a branching network. And that's a case in which you duplicate a node and it maintains the connection to any upstream nodes. And in this case, we'll create a bronze material that uses this same file node in the same way. So I'll select the dancer, gold STSF or standard surface node and duplicate it with the menus. Once again, edit, duplicate with connections to network and we'll need to rearrange the graph again. So click rearrange, and we've got a new one here, dancer gold STSF one, and it's got the same connections to the same nodes. So if I make any change to this texture placement or file node, it will affect both of these materials. Let's assign that new material to the object in the scene, select it, right-click near the top of that new material node and choose assign material to viewport selection. Select it again, answer gold STSF one and open up the attributes with control-A. And let's rename it. We'll call it dancer bronze SDSF. Delete that one at the end. We also want to assign this name to the shading group. Select that string of characters and copy it with control-C. And then back in our graph, we now have a shading group node. We can select that. And additionally select its tab in the attribute editor and rename this as well. So we'll be able to keep things straight. Paste that in with control-V. Press enter. And now we've named the new material and the new shading group with the same string. Going back over to the standard surface material, just make a couple of quick changes for a bronze material. We want it to be a little bit more dull, not quite as shiny. We'll set the roughness to 0.5. And if the Arnold render view doesn't automatically update, we can go ahead and click on start high PR, which is the red triangle in the upper right. I know I've got a rougher material. I'll also change the color, click on the base color swatch and bring that saturation down slightly. Bring the brightness value down quite a bit to let's say 0.2 or so. That's how to use the hyper shade duplicate command to copy nodes and maintain the connections in order to create a branching network.

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