NoteThe Hardware renderer,
with its greater capabilities, is now recommended to perform hardware
rendering. See
Maya Hardware renderer.
The Hardware
Render Buffer lets you render an animation using your
computer’s display graphics card. Hardware rendering is much faster
than software rendering, although the result may be of lower quality.
You can use the Hardware Render Buffer to preview
animations, or to render specific types of particle effects.
Render
Sequence will not render particles successfully if the Render
Passes and “Motion Blur”
options (found in the Multi-Pass Render Options section of
the Hardware Render Buffer Attribute section)
are equivalent integers. For example, if Render Passes is
set to 3 and Motion Blur is set to 3, hardware
particle rendering will not work.
Set them to non-equivalent
values or to use the Disk Cache option (Solvers
> Create Particle Disk Cache).
NoteWhen the overscan
attribute of the camera is anything other than 1.0, image planes
are positioned incorrectly in the hardware render buffer (as can
be seen compared to the correct placement in software rendering).
To work around this limitation,
temporarily set the overscan to 1.0 when hardware buffer rendering.
To open the Hardware Render Buffer
- Select
Window > Rendering Editors > Hardware Render Buffer.
Note On Mac OS
X, the Hardware Render Buffer does
not open in a panel; the panel is blank when you select it.
To set options for the Hardware
Render Buffer
- In the Hardware Render Buffer,
click Render > Attributes. For
a description of the options, see
Hardware Render Buffer menus.
ImportantThe Hardware
Render Buffer renders images based on your monitor’s
display (using screen captures). Before rendering from the Hardware
Render Buffer, make sure the Hardware Render Buffer fits
on your monitor, make sure no other window overlaps the Hardware
Render Buffer, and disable your computer’s screen saver.
To determine hardware rendering quality
- In the Shading menu
in the view panel, make sure Smooth Shade All and Hardware
Texturing are selected.
- In Hypershade, double-click the material
swatch you want to preview to open its Attribute Editor.
- In the Hardware Texturing section
of the material’s Attribute Editor, the Textured channel
menu contains the attributes you can hardware render. Select the Textured channel
you want to view from the menu.
Note
- You can only view one channel at a time.
- To view an attribute, it must be mapped
to a texture. Attributes that are not mapped are dimmed.
- Some channels, such as Bump
Map, do not provide hardware textured results. You must
use Render View to see the results.
- Select the resolution you want from
the Texture resolution menu.
Use the flipbook
(Linux and Windows only)
The Flipbook lets
you play back a rendered sequence of images. The sequence is displayed
using the fcheck utility.
To play back a rendered sequence of images
- Select the sequence from the Flipbooks menu.
The sequence is displayed using the Fcheck utility.
