After setting up your render layers and creating your render passes in Maya, you may want to export your elements to be composited in Composite.
Unlike the scene name, which can change, for example, from version one to version two, the scene anchor does not change. It uniquely connects a Maya scene to a scene composition in a Composite project. All elements that belong to the same composite, for example, cameras, render passes, render layers, and so forth, should have the same scene anchor. A scene anchor is only required if you plan to updated your scene compositions in Composite.
Before exporting to Composite, ensure that all your scene elements are named correctly. Avoid renaming elements (for example, a camera name or a render pass name) halfway through your workflow. Composite does not recognize the renaming of scene elements, since renamed elements are flagged as new elements to be inserted in the compositions. Therefore, if your composition contains old and new elements, you are responsible for cleaning up your composition after an update. For example, if you export for the first time with camera1 and then change your camera name to camera2 and export again, Composite does not update the camera in the composite from camera1 to camera2. Instead, your composite now contains two cameras: camera 1 and camera 2.
You can also create a template that instructs Composite on how to update the composite. A template is a Composite precomp file with nodes that contain anchor information. For example, if you have 15 passes in your scene, but only 2 of the passes are blended together in the template, then only these 2 passes are blended together in your composite. Specify a template for each layer using the Render Settings window, Passes tab. When Composite sees the template, it duplicates it, and then looks for the elements with specific anchors (render layer/camera/render pass anchors).
Create and use a template with the pre-compositing workflow
Refer to the following table for list of file formats that Composite supports, as well as their supported bit depths.
Format | File Extension | Supported bit depths for imported files |
---|---|---|
Bitmap | .bmp | 8 |
Cineon | 10 | |
DPX | .dpx | 8, 10, 16 |
HDR | .hdr | 32 |
IFF | .iff | 8, 16, 32 |
JPEG/JFIF | .jpg, .jpeg | 8 |
OpenEXR | 16 bit float, 32 | |
Photoshop | .psd | 8, 16 |
PICT | .pict | 8, 16 |
PNG | .png | 8, 16 |
QuickTime | .mov | |
SGI | .sgi | 8, 16 |
RGB | .rgb | 8, 16 |
Targa | .tga | 8, 16 |
TIFF | .tif, .tiff | 8, 16, 32 |
Softimage | .pic | 8 |
RLA | .RLA | 8, 16 |
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