Substance shaders for mental ray

Install

First of all, make sure you have these environment variables set:

• MAYA_LOCATION should be set to Maya root folder (it’s a good style)
• SUBSTANCE_ROOT should be set to the substance’s root folder
• MAYA_SCRIPT_PATH should include SUBSTANCE_ROOT/mel
• XBMLANGPATH should include SUBSTANCE_ROOT/xpm
• MI_CUSTOM_SHADER_PATH should include SUBSTANCE_ROOT/mi
• MI_RAY_INCPATH should include SUBSTANCE_ROOT/mi
• MI_LIBRARY_PATH should include SUBSTANCE_ROOT/lib

You may do this by using a simple shell script, which set them before starting Maya:

start_maya.bat on windows:

set MAYA_LOCATION="c:\Alias\Maya7.0" 
set SUBSTANCE_ROOT=c:\substance
set MAYA_SCRIPT_PATH=%MAYA_SCRIPT_PATH%;%SUBSTANCE_ROOT%\mel
set XBMLANGPATH=%XBMLANGPATH%;%SUBSTANCE_ROOT%\xpm
set MI_CUSTOM_SHADER_PATH=%MI_CUSTOM_SHADER_PATH%;%SUBSTANCE_ROOT%\mi
set MI_RAY_INCPATH=%MI_RAY_INCPATH%;%SUBSTANCE_ROOT%\mi
set MI_LIBRARY_PATH=%MI_LIBRARY_PATH%;%SUBSTANCE_ROOT%\lib
%MAYA_LOCATION%\bin\maya.exe

start_maya.sh on linux:

#!/bin/sh
export MAYA_LOCATION="/usr/aw/maya" 
export SUBSTANCE_ROOT="~/substance" 
export MAYA_SCRIPT_PATH="${MAYA_SCRIPT_PATH}:${SUBSTANCE_ROOT}/mel" 
export XBMLANGPATH="${XBMLANGPATH}:${SUBSTANCE_ROOT}/xpm" 
export MI_CUSTOM_SHADER_PATH="${MI_CUSTOM_SHADER_PATH}:${SUBSTANCE_ROOT}/mi" 
export MI_RAY_INCPATH="${MI_RAY_INCPATH}:${SUBSTANCE_ROOT}/mi" 
export MI_LIBRARY_PATH="${MI_LIBRARY_PATH}:${SUBSTANCE_ROOT}/lib" 
${MAYA_LOCATION}/bin/maya

If you have admin rights, you can put them to your environment permanently.

to finish install, add this line to the end of maya.rayrc file:

$include "substance.mi" 

NOTE: Standalone version of mental ray doesn’t require any additional changes in it’s rayrc file.