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This is such a great mel you made. Indespensable for showing wireframe on demoreels as unfortinatly maya dosn't really have an easy way to make wireframe on its own. But I can't get it to work for Maya 8.5. can you pleease make an update thanks!
Well, interesting automatic setup...but still not good results.
To get really good quad or ngon wireframe renders just use vector render instead. Select objects, Harden all edges, Go into Maya Vector edge settings and use Outlines, set edge color to white and size to 3, press render. Use black fill and white edgelines on black background and invert in photoshop and use multiply over a soft normal render image for more finished look.
Maya allready has the option to render wireframes with mr (also incidentaly maya can render wireframes in 3 other free ways too, theese have been around for ages). Grantted not quads by default. But yes even rendering out n-gons isnt hard to do all you need is to redistribute the faces in a line in on uv space and do a contour render. By the way this renders subdivision surface lines too.
But dont take my word for it! You can download a file that illustrates this. Ok so the file is for maya 7, but the same trick works in maya 6 and 6.5 too, no prob and its setup requires no other user interaction than modelling realy.
https://www.hut.fi/~joojala2/highend/mayaMrWireframe.zip
But yeah i guess the shader is quite ok.
Anyway just to point out some fundamental facts. Just becuse you dont know something, does not mean its not possible. :D Incase someones interested i can do a sample for other maya vers too. ;)
Well, quads are rendered by rendering one specific edge for one triangle then another edge index for the next triangle and with some luck it works fine :-)
You can change the edge indices in the shader. The luck comes from the fact that the 2 sibling triangles in the triangles indices are sharing an edge.
It works fine on Maya 8.5 actually.
David Lanier
