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Megascans, Poly Haven and ambientCG in Maya with Arnold or V‑Ray materials assigned

A downloaded asset comes as a folder, with textures named after the convention of its library. In Maya you then have to create an Arnold or V‑Ray shader per material, wire each map in the right color space and assign it. Everything, the CGfield conversion application, delivers for each asset one .mb scene per renderer where that work is already done.

Supported libraries

Everything recognizes Megascans folders (3D models, plants with variants and material-only surfaces) and reads their JSON file for the name, the real-world size and the displacement height. It also reads Poly Haven and ambientCG map folders, keeping the OpenGL normal map, as well as textures.com surfaces and 3D plants. A downloaded ZIP archive can be dropped as is. The AssetBrowser application also browses the Poly Haven and ambientCG catalogs and downloads the chosen asset into your library.

Steps

  1. Install the CGfield launcher with a free account, then Everything.
  2. Drag the asset folder, or its ZIP archive, into Everything. Several assets can be dropped at once.
  3. In the Delivery section, leave “USD component” off, keep the .abc format, tick the Maya native scene, then Arnold, V‑Ray or both.
  4. Choose the output folder and start the export. Each ticked renderer gets its own scene: Asset_arnold.mb, Asset_vray.mb.
  5. Open the scene in Maya, or add the output folder as a library in AssetBrowser and drag the asset from the panel into the 3D view.

What the Maya scene contains

The scene references the Alembic instead of importing it, so it does not carry a second copy of the geometry. The Alembic comes out with one shape per material, named after it, and each shape gets its own material, built from native Arnold or V‑Ray nodes in Maya. Each texture declares its color space, sRGB for colors and Raw for roughness, normal, metalness or opacity, and Maya’s file rules are not applied on top.

Displacement becomes a displacementShader when the source provides a height map. The asset comes in at real-world size: Everything writes in meters and the scene applies the factor to Maya’s centimeters. The delivered renderer becomes the scene’s current renderer, and flat colors without a texture are converted to the scene’s rendering space when it is ACEScg.

Drag the asset from the AssetBrowser panel into Maya

With AssetBrowser installed and Maya connected from the app, the panel opens from the AssetBrowser shelf the next time Maya starts. The renderer for Maya is chosen in the AssetBrowser app, and the panel only shows the assets delivered for that renderer. While you drag, a footprint the size of the asset follows the cursor in the 3D view; on release, the asset lands under the cursor and its .mb scene is imported into the open scene, materials included.

A material-only asset, such as a Poly Haven or ambientCG surface, has no geometry and therefore no .mb scene: dragged onto an object, it assigns its material, built for the chosen renderer. A dragged HDRI becomes the renderer’s dome light.

Good to know

Everything runs on 64-bit Windows 10 and 11. The classic mode needs Houdini 20.5 or later; the Maya scene needs Maya on the machine, with Arnold (MtoA) or V‑Ray for Maya depending on the renderer, and MaterialX alone produces no Maya scene. Textures use relative paths (textures/…) so the delivered folder can be moved, but the Alembic reference in the .mb stays absolute, because Maya resolves references against the project: after a move, repath it in the Reference Editor, or go through the panel, which loads the Alembic sitting next to the .mb. The scene holds an asset’s default variant; with the “All variants” option, the panel can place the others. Subdivision for displacement is still set on the object.

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