Maya’s hardware renderer presents a seamlessly integrated rendering solution that leverages the ever increasing power of next-generation graphics cards to render frames.
Benefits include an intuitive workflow to generate hardware rendered images for previews, specific passes, and hardware rendered particles. You can render and display images using the Render View, which lets you compare images during the shading and lighting tasks.
The user experience and the visual quality of the final images significantly surpass that of the Hardware Render Buffer window. You can produce broadcast-resolution images in less time than with software rendering. In some cases, the quality may be good enough for final delivery.
The hardware renderer uses Maya's existing interface and workflow for assigning shaders, textures, particles, light linking, and so on.
To prevent the windows of other applications from interfering with the rendering of the image, you can perform off-screen batch rendering.
These features are processed natively on the graphics card to improve quality and speed in many cases.
Only specific hardware and platform combinations are supported by hardware rendering. For more information, see:
The Maya hardware renderer supports the following configuration for mental ray area lights:
Hardware rendering supports per light-instance light linking. For example, two instances of a light shape can have different light linking.
For a light instance to illuminate the scene, the light instance should be connected to a light linker node, either indirectly through a light set, or directly through a transform node or a shape node.
If the light shape node is connected to a light linker node, all the instances of the light shape are affected.
The Light Linking Editor does not support instance light linking, so making per-instance light linking must be done indirectly by using light sets.
For example, put light_instance1 and light_instance2 in separate light sets, and set light linking relationship of each of the light sets.
Breaking the light linking of a light_instance directly in the Light Linking Editor (as opposed to through lightset) operates on the light shape, resulting all the instances of the light shape breaking.
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