Poly Haven in Maya, without the Hypershade tax

Most Maya Poly Haven problems are not wiring problems. They are colour space problems, and they are insidious because nothing fails — you get a render that is merely wrong, with roughness reading too glossy and displacement scaled oddly, and no error anywhere to point at. So start there.

Colour management, before anything else

Maya has shipped an ACES OCIO configuration by default since 2022. Every file node has a Color Space attribute, and Maya guesses it from the file format when you load an image. For an 8-bit JPG or PNG it guesses sRGB — correct for base colour, wrong for every other map in a PBR set, because those maps are data, not pictures. A roughness value of 0.5 means 0.5; running it through a transfer curve makes it mean something else.

One map in green, everything else in amber. If you remember nothing else from this page, remember that ratio — and check the Color Space dropdown on every file node you create, because Maya will not check it for you.

The node names, per renderer

The shape of the graph is the same in all four; only the node names and the displacement plumbing change. Worth bookmarking if you move between renderers on different jobs.

Building the network by hand, in Arnold

Written for Arnold because it is the Maya default; substitute node names from the table above for the others and the sequence is unchanged.

1. Unpack the download somewhere permanent. Poly Haven ZIPs extract to a folder of maps sharing a name stem. Put it inside your project's sourceimages, or in a central library folder you will not reorganise later — Maya stores the path, and moving the folder afterwards breaks every file node pointing at it.
2. Create an aiStandardSurface and assign it. Assign to your geometry before wiring anything, so you can judge each connection as you make it.
3. Create one file node per map — and set the Color Space on each one as you go, not afterwards. sRGB for _diff only; Raw for everything else.
4. Connect the straightforward channels. _diff to baseColor, _rough to specularRoughness, _metal to metalness. Use outColorR of a greyscale map for scalar inputs rather than outColor, or Maya will complain about type mismatches.
5. Wire the normal through a converter. Create an aiNormalMap, connect the _nor_gl file node into its input, and connect its output to the surface's normalCamera. Never straight into a colour port.
6. Handle displacement separately. Displacement is not a material connection — it goes to the displacement input of the shading group, and Arnold also needs subdivision enabled on the shape node. Without subdivision it simply does nothing, which is the second most common Poly Haven confusion after colour space.
7. Add the dome light. aiSkyDomeLight, file node into colour, colour space Raw. Rotate the light transform, not the texture.

Or: click the thumbnail

Kiosk keeps the Poly Haven catalogue inside its browser and connects to Maya through a shelf button. With a live session running, clicking a texture set builds the whole network described above — correct nodes for the active renderer, correct colour space per file node, normal routed through the right converter, displacement bound where it belongs.

click rough_plaster_brick_4k

→ aiStandardSurface1 created + assigned
→ 5 file nodes, colour space set per channel
→ aiNormalMap1 → normalCamera
→ displacementShader1 bound to shading group

done · 0.4s

Questions

Related: the same walkthrough for Houdini and Cinema 4D, and the cross-library PBR suffix cheat sheet.