Paint Effects strokes render
seamlessly with the rest of your scenes. They are affected by motion
blur, depth of field, and fog.
-
Render a scene with Paint Effects strokes
-
Create a composite of Paint Effects strokes and your scene
NotePaint Effects uses
the depth buffer generated by the scanline render to determine occlusion.
For rendered effects where multiple surfaces
are visible within a single pixel (such as transparency, antialiased
edges, motion blur, light fog, and volume densities) this causes
problems, as there is only one depth value and one color per pixel
to composite Paint Effects into.
You can affect how the renderer decides how
to reduce multiple depth values visible within a pixel to the single
output depth value using the camera Depth Type attribute.
If you use Closest Visible Depth type,
the renderer picks the surface nearest the camera within the pixel
and transparent surfaces or motion blurred streaks totally obscure
any Paint Effects elements behind
them. If you use Furthest Visible instead, then Paint
Effects elements lying behind these elements will punch
through as if they were totally in front.
The best solutions in these situations are as
follows:
Render a scene with Paint Effects strokes
You can render a scene either from within Maya
or from a Linux shell, or DOS window, or Terminal. Before rendering,
close all applications (including Maya, if you are rendering from
a Linux shell, or DOS window, or Terminal) to maximize the amount
of memory available for rendering.
To
render a scene with Paint Effects strokes
- Set
up your lights, render camera, render options, and Paint
Effects render options. For details, see
Prepare to render scenes with Paint Effects,
- Render
the scene as you would any Maya scene.
- For
information on rendering a single frame, see “Rendering a frame”
in the Rendering guide.
- For
information on rendering an animation, see “Rendering an animation”
in the Rendering guide.
After rendering an image or an animation, you
will want to view the result. For information, see “Viewing Rendered
Images” in the Rendering guide.
NotePaint
Effects renders are always multiprocessed. To turn off
multiprocessing, do the following:
- Exit
Maya (or stop your batch render).
- Set
the MAYA_PAINT_EFFECTS_THREADS environment variable to a value between
1 and 3, for the number of processors you want to use.
- Start
Maya (or restart your batch render).
- Re-render
your scene.
Create a composite of Paint Effects strokes
and your scene
You can render Paint Effects strokes
independently of the rest of your scene, then composite the resulting
images.
To
create a composite
- Render
the scene or animation without Paint Effects strokes
as follows:
- Select
Window > Rendering Editors > Render Settings.
- If
you are compositing an animation, beside Frame/Animation Ext,
select name.#.ext.
- Image
formats which are.iff or.rla will have embedded depth information. Other
formats will create a separate .iff file containing the depth information.
This depth file would normally be written to the projects depth directory.
For this example render the images as .iff.
- In
the Image File Output section,
turn on Depth Channel (Z Depth) beside Channels.
- In
the
Paint Effects Rendering Options section,
turn off Enable Stroke Rendering.
- Render
the scene or animation (for example, rainyday). For
details, see the Rendering guide.
- Save
the scene using a different file name to ensure that the rendered images
do not overwrite each other (for example, rainydaywithstrokes).
- Render
the strokes with the scene as follows:
- Make
sure the camera and the lights are set up to match the camera and lights
in step #1.
- Select
Window > Rendering Editors > Render Settings.
- If
you are compositing an animation, beside Frame/Animation Ext,
select name.#.ext.
- In
the Paint Effects Rendering Options section,
turn on Enable Stroke Rendering and Only
Render Strokes.
- Beside Read
This Depth File, type the location and name of the depth
file for the image you rendered in step #1. Make sure it is an absolute
path name (for example, /h/pearce/rainyday.iff or c:\pearce\rainyday.iff).
If you are rendering an animation, use the file
name format name.#.iff (for example, rainyday.#.iff).
- Render
the scene or animation. For details, see the Rendering guide.
Output images are created and named using the
format name.#.iff (for example rainydaywithstrokes.5.iff).