The Hypershade
While the Maya Tutorial" href="/tutorial/the-multilister.html">multilister from Maya 1 was a useful interface for working with textures, materials, and utility nodes, it was not intuitive, and its interface did not fit in with the rest of Mayans interface conventions. Version 2 provides the Hypershade to remedy that problem (though you can still, of course, use the multilister). Using a similar convention to the Hypergraph, the Hypershade not only shows you interactive previews of what a material or texture will look like, it shows how the elements of a shader network are connected, giving you more information in a more intuitive interface than the multilister. Also, as with the Hypergraph, you can zoom and track the Hypershade like any Maya scene window, and use the F key (frame selected) and A key (frame all) to quickly focus on any element(s) you wish, making it easier to navigate scenes with large numbers of shading groups.
To open the Hypershade, choose Window > Hypershade.
On the left is the Visor window, which is similar to the Outliner but contains graphic icons of textures and allows you to create, as well as view, any material node you wish. On the right is a Hypergraph-like window, known as the graphing window, with all materials listednin a new scene, there will only be two materials listed, the lambertl shader (the default shader for geometry) and the particleCloudl shader (the default shader for particles).
Tip The three buttons at the top left control your view of the Hypershade window. Click the left button to turn off the visor, so that the graphing window fills the Hypershade, or click the right button to turn off the graphing window and view only the visor. (Click either button a second time to restore the view.) Click the middle button to clear the view.
To select a material, simply click on it (it highlights in yellow to show that it is selected). You can then view that materials upstream connections, its down stream connections, or both by clicking the appropriate button at the top right of the Hypershade windownor by choosing Graph and the connection type from the Hypershade menu. The particle cloud, for example, has several inputs and outputs that appear as shown next if you click the Show Up and Downstream connection button. To get back to a general view of materials, choose Materials from the pop-up menu at the top of the Hypershade window.
Note An upstream connection is any Hypershade node that Dfeeds inton the selected node (its output is fed into the currently selected nodenor it is upstream in the data flow). A downstream connection is any node that the currently selected node feeds data into □thus it is downstream from the selected node in the data flow.
Tip You can also view shading groups, utilities, lights, cameras, and so on, by choosing the item from the pop-up menu.
In addition to looking at materials, textures, and such, you can also create these items directly in the Hypershade in one of two ways. To create a material graphically, find the Create subsection of the visor (below the Rendering section), click on the Materials folder to open it (unless it is already open), and MM drag a material ball into the Hypershade side^try the phongE material, for example. After dragging, you will get a new phongE material in the Hypershade, ready for you to adjust. To assign this new material, you can just MM drag it on top of any object in your scene window. (Or you can click on the triangle below the phongE name and choose Assign Material to Selected; this is a good method of assigning the material to several objects at once.) To change the materials attributes (color or transparency, for example), double-click on the material ball to bring up the Attribute Editor, and then make any changes you wish to the material. The ball in the Hypershade, as well as any objects that have this material assigned to them, will be automatically updated with your changes. The other method for creating a new material is simply to choose Create Material from the menu in the Hypershade^Create > Materials > phongE, for example. This produces a new material in the Hypershade window, just as MM dragging the material icon from the visor does.
To assign a texture to your new material, you can again choose to create the material via menu commands (Create > Textures > 2D > Fractal, for example), or just MM drag a swatch from the Create: Textures folder in the visor on top of your material.
Once you complete the drag, a menu will open, letting you select which element of the material (which input) you wish to assign the fractal (or other) texture to. The most common choice is simply Color, so choose that. The Hypershade window will be updated to show that there is a texture input connection (coming from the left is input; going to the right is output) of a fractal texture, and the phongE material ball, plus any objects with the phongE material in your scene, will update to show the new texture.
While there are many other functions the Hypershade can perform besides the basics we have covered here, the centralized power of being able to create, modify, connect and disconnect materials, textures, and so forth, should be obvious from the quick tour we have taken. It is worth the effort to get to know the Hypershade, as it will save you a great deal of time and effort later on in your work with Mayans shader networks.
Tip For more on rendering with the Hypershade, see Chapter 18. -^-
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Mastering MAYA Complete 2
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Chapter 3 - Techniques for Speeding Up Workflow
Mastering MAYA Complete 2
Perry Harovas, John Kundert-Gibbs and Peter Lee
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