A typical rendering workflow

The exact workflow steps and the order in which you perform them vary. Rendering is an iterative process in which you tweak lights, textures, and cameras; adjust various scene and object settings; visualize your changes; then, when you are satisfied with the results, you render your final images.

Once you have completed shading and texturing objects, adding lights, and adding renderable cameras to your scene, you can render your scene. The following workflow outlines the typical steps.

Related topics

Surface shading in the Shading guide.
Light and shadow in the real world in the Lighting guide.
Viewing cameras vs. rendering cameras.

To render a scene

Decide which renderer you want to use, and set scene options for it:
- For detailed information about each of Maya’s renderers, see Maya Software renderer, Maya Hardware renderer, Maya Vector renderer, mental ray for Maya renderer.
- To select a renderer, see Select a renderer.
- To learn more about some of the scene options you can set, see Open the Render Settings window. For detailed descriptions of the scene options, see Render Settings window.
If you plan to composite your work, you can render your scene in layers and passes.
See Render layer overview and Render passes.
Make any required per-object adjustments:
- To adjust the surface quality (tessellation) of objects, see Adjust NURBS tessellation settings, Adjust polygonal tessellation, or Adjust subdivision surface tessellation.
- To adjust per-object settings; for example, settings for lights, cameras, objects, see information on the particular object you want to adjust.
Test iterations of your scene to visualize your the changes you make materials, textures, lights, cameras, and objects.
- To visualize your changes as you make them, see Visualize interactively with IPR.
- To diagnose scene problems, see Run diagnostics.
- To optimize rendering speed image quality, see The speed/quality tradeoff.
When you are satisfied with the results, render the final images.
- See Render a single frame.
- See Command line rendering.
  Note
  When working on the Linux platform and rendering with the Maya Software renderer, you may choose to send the (rendering) output messages to a file instead of to the shell. Use the command maya >& logfile. A file with the name logfile is created and all output messages are saved to this file upon rendering in Maya.