Maya Hardware renderer

Maya’s hardware renderer presents a seamlessly integrated rendering solution that leverages the ever increasing power of next-generation graphics cards to render frames.

Benefits include an intuitive workflow to generate hardware rendered images for previews, specific passes, and hardware rendered particles. You can render and display images using the Render View, which lets you compare images during the shading and lighting tasks.

The user experience and the visual quality of the final images significantly surpass that of the Hardware Render Buffer window. You can produce broadcast-resolution images in less time than with software rendering. In some cases, the quality may be good enough for final delivery.

The hardware renderer uses Maya's existing interface and workflow for assigning shaders, textures, particles, light linking, and so on.

To prevent the windows of other applications from interfering with the rendering of the image, you can perform off-screen batch rendering.

Highlights of supported features

These features are processed natively on the graphics card to improve quality and speed in many cases.

Supported features include:

Display a layered texture and create multiple UV sets for each different texture
Negative light. Frame buffer format must be set to floating point. Select RGBA: 16-bit float per channel from the drop down list in the Render Settings: Maya Hardware tab.
Displacement mapping
Direct input of normal maps
Shader translucency
Blinn shaders
Ramp shaders
Integrated rendering workflow and interface
Polygons and NURBS geometry
Multiple textured channels
Advanced transparency
Hardware particles
Instancing
Point, Directional, Spot, and Ambient Light types
Any number of lights
Light linking
Per-vertex and per-pixel shading effects
Multi-pass and multi-sampling anti-aliasing
File textures for any supported channel
On-the-fly procedural and shading network conversions
Specular highlights
Bumps
Reflections
Shadows
Motion blur
RBG color, alpha matte (mask), and Z depth output
Command line rendering
Render diagnostics, such as warnings for unsupported primitives, shaders, and light types and light features

Supported hardware and platforms

Only specific hardware and platform combinations are supported by hardware rendering. For more information, see:

www.autodesk.com/qual-charts

Limitations of the hardware renderer

The Maya hardware renderer does not support subdivision surfaces.
BOT files are not supported by the hardware renderer. BOT file textures will be rendered black by the hardware renderer.
Hardware renderer does not support point light shadows. Shadows are not created for point lights when the hardware renderer is used.
When displaying mental ray area lights, the hardware renderer does not provide the same results as an actual render, but instead produces a very rough approximation that can be viewed in High Quality mode.
The Maya hardware renderer supports the following configuration for mental ray area lights:
- A Maya area light must be used.
- Only the Rectangle mental ray area light shape is supported.
- Basic light parameters such as Color, Intensity, Decay Rate are supported.
- An approximation of shadows is supported.
- A fixed point sampling rate is used for both diffuse and specular highlights. Sampling artifacts may occur, especially for specular highlights where the area of the light is large and the light is close to the surface.
- Other light shapes and options such as High Samples, High Sample Limit and Low Samples are not supported.

Light linking for instanced lights

Hardware rendering supports per light-instance light linking. For example, two instances of a light shape can have different light linking.

For a light instance to illuminate the scene, the light instance should be connected to a light linker node, either indirectly through a light set, or directly through a transform node or a shape node.

If the light shape node is connected to a light linker node, all the instances of the light shape are affected.

The Light Linking Editor does not support instance light linking, so making per-instance light linking must be done indirectly by using light sets.

For example, put light_instance1 and light_instance2 in separate light sets, and set light linking relationship of each of the light sets.

Breaking the light linking of a light_instance directly in the Light Linking Editor (as opposed to through lightset) operates on the light shape, resulting all the instances of the light shape breaking.