MILA MATERIAL tutorial - new to Maya 2015!

New to Maya 2015, the MILA material is a powerful new layered shader, that enables greater flexibility for the artist while improving performance! If you're using Maya you need to know this shader! Watch this tutorial to get started!

In this video I walk you through the process of creating basic materials using the layered shader. I talk about the different components of the shader, including diffuse, reflective, and refractive layers, and I show how to mix different layers together using weighting and layer masks.

[jjwissler]

Bottom line, the best, straight forward, pleasant tutorial I have ever watched and I have been doing this for 15 years.
Good job James

[noahamrani]

I thought I was listening to a tutorial by TJ Miller, haha. Thanks for the great tutorial!

[cesarsc]

Very good tuto. Thanks James!!!
I prefer Solid Angle "Arnold" as default render for the great "MAYA".

[ForzaS]

Compared to Softimage (XSI)... Maya is so infuriating with the bugs and glitches I keep running into. But thanks to your tutorials, it makes this headache of a program less frustrating. Thank you for doing this.

[lulinasser]

Superb tutorial! Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us. ;)

[Neonorfs]

Thanks for the tutorials, they have helped me a lot 

[MethodJTV]

Karumachan - if I am understanding you correctly, plug your texture into the 'weight' of your glossy reflection layer. This will alpha out the layer - white is opaque, black is transparent. You can control the strength of the reflection separately, using 'tint' on the glossy reflection node, or the IOR/custom falloff blending.

[HapZungLam]

Thank you for the tutorial.  Have you figured out a way to put displacement in?

[Waffletoasters]

I have a question, perhaps you can help me out because I cannot get it to work properly. I have a reflectionmap I made in photoshop of oil stains, have a diffuse map and a black/white map for parts where it reflects more (full white), reflects less (greyish black) and none (all black). Now I normally use a remap color to use these color values as reflection values but I can't find a way to make that work in the mila. The roughness does an overall by default and if I plug it in with the image I can't play with the reflection values, if I use a remap color then it does nothing (not with a luminance either). The Normal reflectivity in the other layer menu only works if you look straight at it. Do you have any ideas on how to make it work?

[ChaosWolfNinja]

Hi do you have any updated videos on the mila shader becasue the documentations on the web are quite scattered.

[nicoventer]

Hi James, thanks for the tutorial, super useful. I do however have a question: is there a way to combine the mila material and any of the toon shaders? Or possibly to plug a toon shader into the mila material (or actually to fake the same effect one would get from the toon shaders with the mila material?)

[atrg]

I have a question, and sorry if it's stupid - i'm still learning: what about mila and linear workflow? Is gamma correction node still necessary when using mila? If yes then what's the proper way to use it? b/c plugging gamma into mila base color gives compatibility warnings in output window. Please help.

[TwoBoltz]

I have an incandescence map I want to plug in, where would I pipe this in if I'm using the MILA material? Thanks.

[sonicdoesfrontflips]

Hey james could you make a video about creating game-friendly fur using shells in maya? I can't find any videos on how to do this with any software be it maya, blender etc

[chellastation]

Can I still assign the Mila material onto a object, even if it has a material on it such as Lambert? and is there any noticeable changes between 2015 and 2016? Will you make a tutorial in the future if you do?

[danielpoptolev]

I have applied transmissive material to an object (Transmissive clear) and yet I achieve better results with the mia material?

[HelroyDelano]

Hey Thanks for the Tut. But i have a trouble shooting question for you.
so im layering out some different layers, but i cant get them too mask out. im using a file texture node, with a black and white image, as either a png, tiff or jpeg, i have tried all three plugged into the weight.. but the result is the same. i cant confine the layers to the masked areas. any thoughts??

[Vladishit_Putler]

does anyone know how to increase samples in a mila material's reflection? I have glossy reflections that render noisy

[atrg]

or maybe i shouldn't use procedural textures with mila - bitmaps only?

[andtara]

suggestion: upload project files
for the newbie