In 3D animation, rendering typically refers to the act of creating a sequence of high-quality image snapshots for each frame
of an animation sequence. After rendering the images, you play them in sequence to create a film or video clip. If the concept
of 3D animation rendering is new to you, consider doing the lesson Rendering a scene before completing this section.
Before you can render the particles using mental ray, you must add the node to your shading network so that mental ray can access the attributes of your particle object such as color information
and .
To add the particleSamplerInfo node to your shading network
- Select to open the window.
- With the particle object selected, click the button to graph its shading network.
- In the shading network, select the shader.
- Click the button beside the attribute in the shader . The window appears.
- In the window, under , click .
- In the right panel, click .
A particleSamplerInfo node now appears in the shading network and connected to the shader node.
To turn on the mental ray for Maya renderer
- In the main menu, select (or click the icon in the window).
- In the window, set setting to .
To batch render the sequence
- In the window, select the tab.
- In the section, set the following options:
- : Type the name Emit. This name will be the base of the filenames created by batch rendering.
- : Select , Maya’s standard image file format. You can use the .iff format for any further work you need to do, including previewing and compositing the animation. If you require a different
format, you can specify it instead of .iff in the .
- F: Select . This specifies that the filenames will have the format prefix.frameNumber.fileFormat. For example, batch rendering the entire 120-frame animation will create Emit.0001.iff, Emit.0002.iff, and so on through Emit.0120.iff.
- : Enter 4. This causes the frameNumber part of the filenames to be four digits prefixed with 0s. For example, the filenames
will be Emit.0001.iff and Emit.0002.iff and so forth.
- In the section, set the following options:
- : Enter 1, the first frame of the animation sequence to be batch rendered.
- : Enter 75, the last frame to be batch rendered. (Rendering all 120 frames may be time-consuming.)
- Close the window.
- Select the menu set and select to render the sequence.
Rendering is complete when the following message appears:
// Result: Rendering Completed. See mayaRenderLog.txt for information. //
To use FCheck to view the sequence of rendered frames
- Select .
The File Browser window appears.
- Using the File Browser, navigate to the images directory for your current project (or wherever you saved the rendered sequence
of images).
- Click the image file to select the first image in the sequence and then click Open.
The FCheck image viewing utility appears and the rendered sequence of 75 frames plays back as an animated loop.