Hypershade
Maya's material and shading network editor
Also known as: Maya Hypershade · Maya materials · Maya aiStandardSurface · Maya shader network · Maya assign material
Definition
Hypershade is Maya's editor for creating and editing materials and shading networks. It shows the shaders, textures and utility nodes in a scene and lets you connect them in a graph, assign materials to objects and preview the result. With the Arnold renderer, the main material is the aiStandardSurface, a physically based shader with base color, metalness, roughness, normal and emission inputs, similar to Principled BSDF in Blender.
In production
For game assets, the material in Maya is mainly used to preview textures and to define material slots, since the engine builds its own materials from the texture files. Give materials clear names, because their names are exported and become material slots in Unreal or Unity. Keep texture file paths relative, and use the viewport 2.0 with High Quality Rendering to preview materials.
