The Nexus is an artist-friendly and production-proven render pass system for Maya and Mental Ray developed in-house at Luma Pictures.

Character render using Nexus shader for Underworld: Evolutions. © Luma Pictures

Pass rendering involves writing out multiple images per rendered frame which are combined in a compositing application. Pass rendering
increases the flexibility of a composite and reduces the amount of expensive re-rendering that is required. Unlike maya's render layer system,
which performs a separate render for each layer, the Nexus writes out all of its passes during the same render, which drastically reduces the
overall render time.

Artist Friendly - The Nexus is designed to imitate Maya's native shaders, so it is immediately familiar to Maya artists. It integrates
directly into the mental ray globals and render viewer.

Nexus Globals - Intuitive yet powerful pass controls.

Nexus Render View - Quickly switch between preview passes Automatically caches preview renders and tags
them with pass names

Additional tabs light context specific will allow you to choose which light to render per pass.

Contact Sheet - The contact sheet provides thumbnails and labels of all rendered passes

Contact shows all auxilary passes and control passes in addtion to the standard passes shown here. *

Per Light Diffuse and Specular - enable rendering of diffuse and specular passes for each light with the click of a button use light
sets to group several lights into one pass

Other Features - Toggle between lambert, blinn, phong, and phongE shading models Supports final gather and global illumination
Built-in ambient occlusion Compatible with Maya's Render Layers - Render a full set of passes per layer Export a shake script
custom-tailored for your scene.

* Renders Featured from Gnomon's BTS Production Texturing DVD (Note: This dvd covers basic Nexus usage)

Download the shader:
** The Luma Nexus is offered free of charge. However, this software is currently Unsupported! (Installation documentation is included in the download package). **

Download @ highend3d.com

Download @ mymentalray.com