Excerpt from 3DNY’s MediaBook: MAYA | Multi-Pass Rendering

Recent versions of Maya have added enhanced support for the multilayered Photoshop file format. In doing so, Maya has added a great deal of capability. However, as might be expected, this new recognition of layers is not as easy to control as it is in Photoshop. That disclaimer aside, these are welcome tools that unbeknownst to most users, could very easily change the way we do texturing and other tasks within Maya. They are really that powerful. They will also have a big effect on what we can do with MPR.

The PSD node is found in the 2D Texture list of the Create Bar. It is added to a surface shader like Blinn or Phong just the way other textures are. This node is most similar to the 2D Image File node, as both are used to import 2d bitmapped image files. The PSD node however is only used for PSD files and has extended options.

The node and its attributes belie the range of workflow options it truly offers. With this node we really have 3 or 4 truly unique new ways to work with our imported textures. We will look at these new workflow options.

Only the introduction is shown on this page:

Download the 30 page PDF chapter here. | More About 3DNY’s Maya|MPR