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Landmarks

A landmark is a shader with a name, a colour and a tag. This section is everything you can do with one.

  • The landmark list

    The page you will live on: create, assign, select, rename, group, isolate, clear and delete.

    The landmark list

  • Palettes

    Five generators, a live preview, and how to hand a whole palette out across a selection in one press.

    Palettes

  • Shaders

    Which shader type to use, how to change it later without losing the assignment, and how to edit the node by hand.

    Shaders

  • Coverage and utilities

    What you have not marked yet, one landmark per mesh shell, transfer between meshes, and baking to vertex colours.

    Coverage and utilities

What a landmark is made of

Part Where it lives Survives
Colour The shader's colour plug — outColor on a surfaceShader, color on a lambert, baseColor on a standardSurface. Saving the scene; the type being changed.
Name The shader node's name. Renaming from anywhere — the Outliner, the Hypershade, a script.
Assignment The shading group's members, per face. Everything Maya does with shading.
Tag An amLandmark attribute on the shader. Renaming, referencing, being opened in a Maya without this tool installed.
Group An amLandmarkGroup string attribute. The same.
Notes An amLandmarkNotes string attribute. The same.
Id An amLandmarkId string attribute — a stable identity for matching across files. Renaming.

Nothing here is a private data format. Open the scene in a Maya without AM Landmark installed and you have shaders with extra attributes and a normal shading assignment — everything still renders, everything still selects.

What it is not

Not a selection set. Sets do not show up in the viewport, and this tool is fundamentally about seeing which region is which.

Not a display layer. Layers hide and template whole objects; landmarks work per face.

Not a colour set. Vertex colours are an excellent output — see baking — but a poor working format: they have no name, no grouping, and no single place to change a colour.

Why shaders

A shader is the only thing in Maya that is per-face, visible in the viewport, saved with the scene, understood by every other tool, and already familiar to everyone who will open the file. The tag is the only thing this tool adds, and it adds it so the tool can tell its shaders from yours.

The working loop

Most passes go like this, and every step has a page:

  1. Generate a palette on Create — eight or sixteen colours that are obviously different from each other.
  2. Assign each one to a face selection from the list.
  3. Mirror to the other side on Symmetry.
  4. Audit what is still bare with Coverage and fix it.
  5. Save the pass on Data so the next scene starts where this one finished.