What's New in Rendering and Render Setup
 
 
 

New Viewport 2.0 features

 

New Viewport 2.0 features include improved support for most parts of Maya, for example, manipulators, tools, shapes, and nodes.

Two new performance options are provided: The Vertex Animation Cache option provides more interactive scrubbing of your animation, and the Thread Dependency Graph Evaluation option provides better performance by evaluating separate characters in separate threads.

New API support for plug-in shapes, hardware shaders, and locators is provided. Approximated support in the viewport is provided for mia_material_* shaders and other mental ray shaders. New effects include screen-space ambient occlusion, motion blur, depth of field and multisample anti-aliasing.

In addition, the new Maya Hardware 2.0 renderer allows you to perform command line rendering for Viewport 2.0, or to batch render to disk or to Render View. You can access the Hardware 2.0 renderer from the Render View window, the Render Settings window, the Script Editor, via the command line renderer, or by selecting Render > Batch Render.

Previewing your composite in the Render View

 

You can now easily create render pass nodes through the Hypershade and view the output of these passes directly in the Render View. Furthermore, you can create basic compositing graphs using render passes and standard Maya shading utility nodes, and visualize the result directly in the Render View or a batch render using the new render target node.

Vector displacement maps

 

Connect a vector displacement map to your shading group in Maya to create complex sculpted surfaces with displacement in arbitrary directions; for example, to create undercuts or overhanging features. You can create vector displacement maps in Mudbox or any comparable software.

You can use this feature with any Maya or mental ray shader; however, you cannot visualize vector displacement maps in the scene view, and you must render using mental ray for Maya.

Support for Ptex textures

 

Maya 2012 provides you with the ability to preview Ptex textures assigned to any standard Maya shading network texture input in Viewport 2.0.

new mental ray Rendering book

All mental ray shading and rendering documentation has now been moved to the new mental ray Rendering book. mental ray specific nodes and attributes descriptions have been moved to the mental ray node attributes chapter.

mental ray attributes only accessible when mental ray plug-in is loaded

Previously, all mental ray attributes were available in the nodes' Attribute Editor regardless of whether the mental ray plug-in was loaded.

Beginning with Maya 2012, mental ray attributes are only accessible when the mental ray plug-in (Mayatomr.mll) is loaded.

mental ray for Maya users should ensure that the Mayatomr.mll plug-in is set to Auto load in the Plug-in Manager.

mental ray support for compressed .tif files

mental ray for Maya now supports input of LZW compressed .tif texture files.

EXR version 1.7 support

The EXR version 1.7 support of channel names of length 252 characters is available in Maya 2012. To utilize this option, create and set the MAYA_EXR_LONGNAME environment variable to 1. You must ensure, however, that any other applications you are using also support this standard.