Convert Paint Effects to polygons

User Guide > General > Paint Effects and 3D Paint > Painting in 3D >

You can convert Paint Effects strokes to polygonal meshes, including construction history, using Modify > Convert > Paint Effects to Polygons.

This allows you to:

render in any renderer, including the Maya Software renderer, mental ray for Maya, the Hardware renderer, and the Vector renderer (For more information, see the Rendering guide.)
have Paint Effects show up in reflections, refractions and through transparent objects (For more information, see the guides Lighting and Shading.)
use other polygon editing tools on them (For more information, see the Polygonal Modeling guide.)

You can edit brush attributes and see the effect on the output mesh. Shaders that closely match the look of the Paint Effects render are automatically generated and assigned to the resulting meshes. You can optionally choose to output color per vertex and also to bake lighting onto the mesh.

NoteTo optimize converting Paint Effects to polygons, see Optimizing Paint Effects Mesh quality.

For descriptions of the options in the Convert Paint Effects to Polygons Options window, see Modify > Convert > Paint Effects to Polygons.