Before you render a scene with Paint Effects strokes, you must light the scene, set up the camera you are rendering from, and select the properties that the rendered images will have. You might also want to set up your scene so that you can render Paint Effects strokes separately from other elements in the scene and later composite them together. For details on performing these tasks, see:
When light shines on an object, it illuminates the object’s surface. Without light, you could not see surfaces. The paint on a stroke behaves like a surface, and therefore requires light for you to see it.
You can use the lights in your scene to illuminate paint (real lights), or you can use a Paint Effects light that only affects the stroke paint and nothing else in the scene. If the stroke brushes use real lights (see Real Lights), your scene must have a light to render the strokes. For information on adding lights to your scene, see the Lighting guide.
By default, your scene is forced to use real lights in the Paint Effects Globals (see Force Real Lights).
If you illuminate your strokes (see Illuminate stroke paint), you can create the following types of shadow effects for each brush:
These shadow effects do not depend on the lights in your scene. In fact, if the strokes do not use Real Lights, these shadow effects will still render.
If you use real lights in your scene, you can also make strokes cast shadows (depth map shadows) on objects.
Set up the camera you are rendering from
To ensure that the strokes in your scene render well with fog and geometry, you must modify a couple of camera settings before you render.
If you must set the Depth Type to Closest Visible Depth, and you are rendering with Physical fog, turn on Transparency Based Depth and make sure the Threshold is less than 1 (but not 0). (Threshold defines how transparent an object must be before it is ignored for the depth buffer.) If you do not do this, Paint Effects strokes will ignore their depth settings and render in front of all your geometry.
Set the properties of rendered images
During rendering, Maya generates a two-dimensional image, or series of images, from a specific view of a three-dimensional scene, and saves it as an image file. You can control the properties of rendered image files according to your post-production and presentation requirements.
To set the properties of rendered images
Set up to render Paint Effects strokes
By default, Paint Effects strokes render with the rest of your scene.
You can define render settings to render Paint Effects strokes separately from other elements in the scene and later composite the scene and strokes together.
To set up to render Paint Effects strokes