Many people keep asking if anyone got the custom mentalray bump nodes to work. Because many people think custom mentalray bump nodes are waaay better than the maya's default bump2d nodes. Let's have a look.

First off we need to get the mr bump shading-network actually working. Here's a hypershade snapshot of the raw bump-vector generating part:


The connections are as follows:
mib_texture_vector2.outValue> mib_texture_remap2.input
mib_bump_basis2.u> mib_bump_map1.u
mib_bump_basis2.v> mib_bump_map1.v
mib_texture_remap2.outValue> mib_bump_map1.coord
mentalrayTexture2.message> mib_bump_map1.tex

Whereas the mentalray Texture is being automatically created and connected when clicking on the checker button next to 'tex' in the mib_bump_map node.


Ok, but what should we do now with the created network? There are several things we could do:
We could plug it into the bump input of one of Francesca Luce's bumpCombiner, or we could plug it into the NormalCamera (Bump Mapping slot) of any standard Maya shader - basically the mib_bump_map has the same output as a bump2d: