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Poliigon Material Converter Addon for Maya
Poliigon Material Converter Addon for Maya

A Maya tutorial on how to install the Poliigon Material Converter addon.

Updated over a week ago

This addon will automatically create a material out of your texture maps. It works in Maya 2016 and up, with renderers; Vray, Arnold, Redshift, Octane and MentalRay.

Latest version: v1.4.6 (Changelog)

How to install

  1. Download the material converter .zip file and extract it into a folder on your computer.

  2. In Maya, select the custom shelf on the toolbar and drag the "Installer_Poliigon_Material_Converter.mel" file from the extracted zip folder onto your main view port.

  3. An explorer will now open, then navigate to the extracted "Poliigon_Material_Converter" folder where the script is located and select this folder. The Poliigon icon will then appear in your custom shelf and is now ready to use.

Usage

For more information regarding using our converter please check out the Maya area of our Help Section for tutorials on subjects ranging from basic usage to more in-depth subjects.

Textures folder

You may either select a single folder or a root folder that holds multiple texture sets. Once the folder has been chosen, the converter will detect and display how many supported materials were found. Once the textures have been converted, they will be saved to the hypershade window.

Renderer

You may choose between the following supported rendering engines:

(To ensure full compatibility, please use the latest versions of these renderers)

  • Arnold

  • Mental Ray

  • Octane

  • Redshift

  • V-Ray

(RenderMan not currently supported, watch out for updates in 2023)

Advanced options

  • Include Ambient Occlusion (AO) maps - If ambient occlusion maps are present with the detected materials, they will automatically be added to the material shader setup.

  • Include Displacement maps - If displacement maps are present with the detected materials, they will automatically be added to the material shader setup.

  • Conform UV maps to image dimensions - For textures in a rectangular (non-square) format, this option will adjust the UVs for each map type to match the image dimensions. Please note this function is disabled by default.

  • Use 16 bit maps - This will replace all 8 bit images with higher quality 16 bit versions when available, and is disabled by default.

  • Apply materials to preview spheres - Enable this option to have each imported material appear on a standard sphere. This will allow you to quickly preview materials before applying them to your models. Please note this function is disabled by default.

Complete materials

The material converter is designed to function only when it detects materials that have a complete set of maps. In order to form a complete material these four map types are required; COL (color), REFL (reflection), GLOSS, and NRM (normals).

Please note that some materials come with ALPHAMASKED files instead of a COL map and contain a transparency channel. These will automatically load in if a COL map is not detected.

Specialty maps

All other additional maps that may come with materials are considered specialty and not required for the converter to work. However some of these are directly supported such as AO, Displacement and Alphamasked maps.

Metal materials

When it comes to metal materials Poliigon offers two different workflows; metalness and specular. Unfortunately not all renderers for Maya support the metalness workflow and so the only supported workflow for this converter is the specular workflow. Please make sure to download this workflow to have the converter work properly.

Support

If you encounter any bugs while using the converter then please contact our support team with the details at support@polligon.com. Thanks!

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