In 3D animation, rendering typically refers to the act of creating a sequence of high-quality image snapshots for each frame of an animation sequence. After rendering the images, you play them in sequence to create a film or video clip. If the concept of 3D animation rendering is new to you, consider doing the lesson Rendering a scene before completing this section.

Before you can render the particles using mental ray, you must add the particleSamplerInfo node to your shading network so that mental ray can access the attributes of your particle object such as color information and Lifespan.

To add the particleSamplerInfo node to your shading network

1. Select Window > Rendering Editors > Hypershade to open the Hypershade window.
2. With the particle object selected, click the button to graph its shading network.
3. In the shading network, select the Lambert shader.
4. Click the Map button beside the Color attribute in the Lambert shader Attribute Editor. The Create Render Node window appears.
5. In the Create Render Node window, under Maya, click Utilities.
6. In the right panel, click .

A particleSamplerInfo node now appears in the shading network and connected to the Lambert shader node.

To turn on the mental ray for Maya renderer

1. In the main menu, select Window > Rendering Editors > Render Settings (or click the Render Settings icon in the Render View window).
   
2. In the Render Settings window, set Render Using setting to mental ray.
   

To batch render the sequence

1. In the Render Settings window, select the Common tab.
2. In the File Output section, set the following options:
   • File Name Prefix: Type the name Emit. This name will be the base of the filenames created by batch rendering.
   • Image Format: Select Maya IFF (.iff), Maya’s standard image file format. You can use the .iff format for any further work you need to do, including previewing and compositing the animation. If you require a different format, you can specify it instead of .iff in the Render Settings.
   • Frame/Animation ext: Select name.#.ext. This specifies that the filenames will have the format prefix.frameNumber.fileFormat. For example, batch rendering the entire 120-frame animation will create Emit.0001.iff, Emit.0002.iff, and so on through Emit.0120.iff.
   • Frame padding: Enter 4. This causes the frameNumber part of the filenames to be four digits prefixed with 0s. For example, the filenames will be Emit.0001.iff and Emit.0002.iff and so forth.
3. In the Frame Range section, set the following options:
   • Start frame: Enter 1, the first frame of the animation sequence to be batch rendered.
   • End frame: Enter 75, the last frame to be batch rendered. (Rendering all 120 frames may be time-consuming.)
4. Close the Render Settings window.
5. Select the Rendering menu set and select Render > Batch Render to render the sequence.

   Rendering is complete when the following message appears:

   // Result: Rendering Completed. See mayaRenderLog.txt for information. //

To use FCheck to view the sequence of rendered frames

1. Select File > View Sequence.

   The File Browser window appears.

2. Using the File Browser, navigate to the images directory for your current project (or wherever you saved the rendered sequence of images).
3. Click the image file Emit.0001.iff to select the first image in the sequence and then click Open.

   The FCheck image viewing utility appears and the rendered sequence of 75 frames plays back as an animated loop.