User Guide > Rendering and Render Setup > Rendering > Appendices > Appendix G: mental ray
user framebuffers >
mental ray for Maya user
framebuffers
In mental ray for Maya, you can use an unlimited number of user framebuffers. Framebuffers in mental ray for Maya are rendering attributes (color, alpha, depth, and so on) that control which image channels are passed to the shader and in what format. For example, a 2D blur output shader might require 8-bit color, floating-point alpha, and motion vector channels.
Typically, framebuffers are used in conjunction with output passes. Framebuffers can be useful to split a render into component passes that you can later composite. mental ray camera output passes can use user framebuffers to output to file.
