So far, you’ve seen the
results of shading the apple and other surfaces in the scene view.
In this view, Maya uses your computer’s graphics hardware to display
the shading and textures quickly but with low quality.
To
view the shading results of the colors and textures in a more realistic
fashion, you must use a renderer. In this lesson you use a process
called mental ray for Maya rendering.
mental
ray rendering can take seconds or minutes to render a single frame
of animation from your scene, depending on the complexity of surface
geometry, shaders, lighting and other visual elements present in
the scene.
The following table outlines
the different types of renderers in Maya and what each is used for:
| Renderer |
Use |
mental
ray® for
Maya® renderer
|
A general purpose renderer
that includes exclusive, advanced rendering functionality, such
as host and network parallel rendering, area light sources for soft
shadows, global illumination, and caustics (light patterns).
|
Maya’s Software renderer
|
A general purpose renderer
with broad capabilities. You can produce high-quality images with
complex shading networks, including procedural textures and ramps. Software
rendering is computed through your machine’s processor.
|
Interactive
Photorealistic Rendering (IPR)
|
A feature of Maya’s software
renderer and mental ray for Maya renderer, used to make interactive
adjustments to the final rendered image. You can adjust shading and
lighting attributes in real-time, and IPR automatically updates
the rendered image to show the effects of your changes. IPR is useful
for tweaking an image before rendering to disk.
|
Maya Vector renderer
|
A specialized renderer
used to produce stylized renderings (for example, cartoon, tonal
art, line art, hidden line, wireframe) in various bitmap image formats
(IFF, TIFF) or in 2D vector formats (SWF, AI, EPS, SVG). The Maya
Vector renderer is often used to render web-ready images.
|
Maya’s Hardware renderer
|
A general purpose renderer
that uses your machine’s graphics card for computation. You can
produce broadcast resolution images in less time than with software rendering,
and in some cases, the quality may be good enough for final delivery.
|
The Render View window
When
you render your scene the rendered image appears in its own window called
the Render View. By default, the Render
View uses the same camera as the Scene View (persp), but includes
particular rendering capabilities.
The following table shows
the differences between the Render View and the Scene View:
|
|
Scene View |
Render View |
Display
|
3D object scene
|
2D rendered image
|
Surfaces
|
modeled surfaces, the
grid, vertices, curves, and object manipulators
|
shaded surfaces only
|
Background
|
default gray background
|
black background by default because
only objects with materials that are lit can be seen
|
Quality
|
low-quality, colors and textures
do not appear in their final display form
|
high-quality, colors
and textures appear in their final rendered form
|
