Approximating Game Shaders in Maya

Shaders
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1

Currently our animators’ Maya assets have Phong Shaders, and do no look like the game engine much. We’d like to get closer to that.

Our game uses typical PBR textures - albedo, specular, smoothness, normal, ambient occlusion, subsurfacescatter.
I’m wondering what the best method to repro this in Maya is.
I’d prefer a solution that ‘plays nice’ with scripting and looks close enough
Than one that is exact but tedious/frustrating to work with

Things I have used so far:
Stingray PBR shader nodes (easy to script , close enough)
DX11 shaders (looks more exact but tedious and frustrating to deal with)

I’ve been told that Arnold supports PBR shading too, but I have messed with it.

What have you used to approximate game shaders in Maya?

2

The StingrayPBR shader is (like it it sounds) a pretty vanilla PBR implementation. You can hook it up with the ShaderFX node-based shading system (and there’s code for manipulating that system here)

These parts are easy… the trickier bit will be providing lighting and a reflection environment that is a good proxy for your game, In past years the the Maya stingray implementation had bad fallback reflection cube which made things look too shiny – if you run into that you can save it by providing a good GGX-filtered cubemap in the same value range as your game lighting