But this is not the purpose to write this post. Purpose is how can you control the details of the converted mesh. If you need to get a highly detailed displaced mesh then “Feature Displacement” feature comes handy.

Feature displacement section is found under shape node tab of the selected mesh in the attribute editor.  To increase the details of the resulting mesh you will set “Initial Sample Rate” to more than 6 which is default.

 JS_MultiLayer shader from Jan Sandstörm comes handy in such situations as it allow us to layer multiple shaders. Once we combine all shaders we then feed it to writeToColorBuffer.

There is one more step to do before we can get the combined matte pass. WriteToColorBuffer works for shaders which are applied to objects in the scene but if we apply the combined JS_Multilayer shader to objects then we may not get other required passes like color, master beauty etc. as we want them. So rather than applying the JS_Multilayer shader to objects in scene we plug it in the “shading group” of the shaders for which we need the combined matte pass. Dont worry if you dont understand what this means as I have attached a scene file so you can have a look at the connections.

One thing I noticed is this procedure works better with mia_x, mia_x_passes and JS_Multilayer but somehow doesn’t give needed results with Maya shaders like Lambert, Blin etc.

Download scene file

string $shaderName[] = stringArrayRemoveDuplicates(
     ls("-mat", listConnections( listConnections("-type","shadingEngine",`ls -sl -o -dag -s`))
   )
);
select -r $shaderName[0];

We are using an Array ( $matName[] ) here so that we can select the first shader returned from the list of multiple shaders (just in case) applied to one object.

stringArrayRemoveDuplicates remove all duplicate items from a string array. There will be only one occurrence of each string item in the returned string array.

So as an alternative, I found another shader named JS_MultiLayers from the same author, Jan Sandstörm and this one is even better as it provides you with 30 layers and Photoshop like blend modes(Add, Screen, Multiply etc.).

This shader can come handy in many situations like adding separate specular shader  for more control, above SSS shader or creating a Satin shader by layering 2 mia_material, one for the base diffused speculars and one for the shine ( as seen in the image above – a still from my company short film “Hi Honey”).

If you just drag and drop other Mentalray shaders like mia_material_x onto mix20Layer color slot, then the connection editor opens up rather than the connection being made.

If this happens then you can manually make the following connection using the Connection Editor.

resultR -> f_colorLayer_0R

resultG -> f_colorLayer_0G

resultB -> f_colorLayer_0B

This is not a fix but an alternative to get things done. When you run the below mentioned mel command it will proceed the timeline frame by frame and will save the resulting rendered animation in a SWF file and this is what the Batch render command would do if it worked.

vectorize -if swf 
    -w 760 -h 468 -dl 0 -ct 9.6 -scf 1 
    -ro Safe -fs SingleColor -es Outline 
    -sb -sh -ec 0 0 0 -ew 0 -oai 1 
    -fv 5 
    -sf 1 -ef 23
    -bf 1 -fr 24 
    -imageFormat swf -ff "filename.ext";

Command options like -w(width) -h(height) -sf(start frame) -ef(end frame) and the others are explained in detail in Maya help.