in the mental ray shader libraryyou can choose out of presets, but in general you need to tweak settings in order to get what you want,you can download ( often free) shaders from the internet, which you basically import into your scene , if you really want to have presets out of the box use 3ds Max...

Originally Posted by mastone

Thanks Mastone. What I'm seeing is, Window>Rendering Editors>Hypershade. Is this correct?

Cheers
Terry

Originally Posted by TerryG

Sure you do. You might need to enable it. Window > Settings/Preferences > Plug-in Manager... check that Mayatomr.mll is loaded. Hope that helps.

Originally Posted by stwert

It does not show up as a "library". You select a mental ray material for instance a mia material and then look at the "presets". There are presets for plastic, metal, chrome, glass, etc..

Originally Posted by ctbram

Get the book "Introducing Maya" by Sybex, it's a great beginner book and covers all different fields of Maya so it will give you a brilliant overview. Works well as a reference to use on the side of video tutorials and it also contains some very good text tutorials that you can follow to get the basics down.

You can get it on amazon https://www.amazon.com/Introducing-Ma.../dp/0470502169
They release a new edition every year so you should be able to get one that matches your version. I couldn't find 2010 so it's possible that they skipped straight to 2011, but getting that one or 2009 would work just fine, there's not much difference between these versions so you should be able to follow it with no problem.

Nilla

Originally Posted by Miss_Nova