Beyond the lesson

Learning Resources > Tutorials > Getting Started with Maya > Rendering > Lesson 1: Rendering a scene >

Beyond the lesson

In this lesson, you were introduced to some of the basic concepts for rendering an image. In this lesson you learned that:

Surfaces are assigned shading materials to provide basic attributes such as color, shininess, reflectivity, and so on. Each shading material has unique characteristics that can be modified to suit your requirements.
You can additionally assign a texture map to some of the shading material attributes so that your objects appear more realistic.
Maya provides several methods for rendering an image. You can render using the Maya Software renderer, the Maya Hardware renderer, the Maya Vector renderer or the mental ray^® for Maya^® renderer. Each type of renderer has specific advantages and uses.
You can choose the size and quality for a rendered image prior to rendering based on your specific needs and requirements.
You can render a single image or a sequence of images from an animation.
You can view one image, or a sequence of rendered frames using the FCheck utility.

As you render scenes, consider the following issues:

Using IPR

There are a few limitations to using IPR for fast visual feedback as you adjust shading and lighting. Besides being unable to provide production-quality anti-aliasing, IPR cannot display several other advanced display characteristics, for example, true surface reflections (raytracing) and 3D motion blur. If an advanced display characteristic seems to be missing from an IPR-rendered frame, try rendering the frame with the software renderer.

If you change the camera view, turn Depth Map Shadows on or off, or reposition shadows, IPR does not update the rendered image automatically. You must refresh the image. From the Render View window, select IPR > Refresh IPR Image.

Batch rendering

In this lesson, you used the Maya software renderer to check the image quality of two frames before you started to batch render. When you create scenes with sophisticated animation, it’s useful to batch render with low-quality resolution to check the animation accuracy before batch rendering with production-quality resolution. For instance, you might preview your animation with the frames resulting from batch rendering at a small image size (320 by 240) with Preview Quality anti-aliasing.

You don’t need to use the batch renderer to render single frames from your scene to disk. From the Render View window, select File > Save Image.

Hardware rendering

Hardware rendering leverages the power provided by hardware graphics cards to render your images. The benefits of hardware rendering include the ability to batch render frames more quickly than with software rendering, and rendering specific particle effects not possible through software rendering. In some cases, the image quality may be good enough for final use. You access the hardware renderer by selecting Render > Render Using > Maya Hardware.

Hardware rendering has its own limitations when compared to software rendering. For more information on hardware rendering, see the Maya Help.

Rendering in layers

It’s often useful to render objects in your scene in different layers and combine them using compositing software. In some cases, you must render some optical effects and then composite them afterwards. Rendering in layers can end up being faster than rendering an entire scene, and it lets you replace individual objects quickly if the need arises. To set up layers, use the Layer Editor, which appears below the Channel Box by default. For more information, see “Render layers” in the Maya Help.