Overview
The assignment panel is a handy interface for inspecting and modifying shader and attribute connections. This panel doesn’t provide more functionalities than the 3Delight Relationship Editor, but it has a couple nice properties:
- It is “dockable”.
- It takes less screen estate.
3Delight Assignement Panel
Usage is very simple: selecting a Maya object updates the panel’s content to show current assignments; all modifications performed through the panel will be applied to the selected object. Obviously, this interface doesn’t provide a global overview of the different connections as in the case with the 3Delight Relationship Editor.
The 3Delight Assignment panel allows you to assign as Object/Collection and Override shaders any type of shader, including any Maya HyperShade shader node. Click on Show> Show Maya Shaders to see these shaders available in the pulldowns.
Assignment Panel Components
Object assignments
This is the traditional object-level assignment scheme.
Collections assignments
Those are connection that are active on the collection level. They will be activated if the rendered pass selects this collection. Refer to Understanding Collections for more information.
Override assignments
Override shaders are mainly useful for passes that need the same shader to be attached on all geometry. Say you have an ambient occlusion pass, as in the example above, with all objects having the same shader. Simply declare a collection, assign an ambient occlusion shader to it and select the collection in the "Render Sets" section of the Scene Elements group of rendering attributes. No further shader assignment is needed, when rendering the pass all objects will have the ambient occlusion shader automatically attached to them.
Additionally:
Clicking on the “texture” square near the shader will open the Shader Selector to list shader files of the relevant type. Once a file is selected, a shader node is created and assigned to the currently selected objects. See The Shader Selector.
Clicking on AE will show shaders parameter in Maya’s Attribute Editor. Some customization of a given shader’s gadgets is possible; see Customizing RenderMan Shader Nodes User Interface.
Attribute Nodes can be created and assigned in this panel.
Other shader types (such as atmosphere and interior) can be shown in this panel by enabling them in the "Show" menu.