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Render time smoothing of polygon meshes
Render time smoothing of polygon meshes
Rendering a smooth polygon mesh
Smooth polygon meshes at render time
To smooth polygon meshes at render time, use
the following workflow. This is a very efficient method of smoothing
polygon meshes as it reduces the amount of data calculations during
interactive manipulation.
Major advantages for this feature include the
following:
- During
translation, mental ray for Maya only translates the mesh hull, and
the actual smoothing occurs at render time.
- This
workflow delays smoothing until required because mental ray only tesselates
and smoothes the mesh when a ray, for example, a camera ray, reflection
ray, or shadow ray, hits the object.
The drawback of this feature, however, is that
all Maya creasing will render differently with this technique, since
the creasing appears different in the viewport as compared to its
mental ray render.
- Open
the Approximation Editor (
Window > Rendering Editors > mental ray > Approximation Editor).
- Click
the Create button beside the Subdivision
approx. (Poly, Subdiv) attribute to create and assign
a subdivision approximation to your polygon.
- Render
the scene in mental ray.
NoteYou can also smooth polygon meshes by selecting
Mesh > Smooth. This
method creates denser geometry in the viewport and can increase
the number of data calculations for interactive manipulation.