Beyond the lesson

In this lesson, you were introduced to some of the basic concepts for rendering an image. In this lesson you learned that:

Surfaces are assigned shading materials to provide basic attributes such as color, shininess, reflectivity, and so on. Each shading material has unique characteristics that can be modified to suit your requirements.
You can additionally assign a texture map to some of the shading material attributes so that your objects appear more realistic.
Maya provides several methods for rendering an image. You can render using the mental ray^® for Maya^® renderer, the Maya Software renderer, the Maya Hardware renderer, or the Maya Vector renderer. Each type of renderer has specific advantages and uses.
You can choose the size and quality for a rendered image prior to rendering based on your specific needs and requirements.
You can render a single image or a sequence of images from an animation.
You can view one image, or a sequence of rendered frames using the FCheck utility.

As you render scenes, consider the following issues:

Batch rendering

In this lesson, you used the Maya Hardware 2.0 renderer to check the image quality of two frames before you started to batch render. When you create scenes with sophisticated animation, it’s useful to batch render with low-quality resolution to check the animation accuracy before batch rendering with production-quality resolution. For instance, you might preview your animation with the frames resulting from batch rendering at a small image size (320 by 240) or with a lower anti-aliasing sample count.

You don’t need to use the batch renderer to render single frames from your scene to disk. From the Render View window, select File > Save Image.

Hardware rendering

Hardware rendering leverages the power provided by hardware graphics cards to render your images. The benefits of hardware rendering include the ability to batch render frames more quickly than with software rendering, and rendering specific particle effects not possible through software rendering. For more information about hardware rendering particles, see Rendering particles in the Maya User Guide.

Hardware rendering is used in the scene view, and Viewport 2.0 allows for high interactivity for complex scenes with many objects as well as large objects with heavy geometry. You can also batch render using this hardware renderer by selecting the Maya Hardware 2.0 renderer from the Render Settings window.

Hardware rendering has its own limitations when compared to software rendering. For more information on hardware rendering, see the Maya Help.

Using render passes

It's often useful to render attributes of your scene in different passes and combine them using compositing software. When using the mental ray for Maya renderer, you can render each of diffuse, shadow, reflection, specular, and ambient occlusion in a separate pass and then composite the passes afterwards. You can select a subset of the objects or lights in your scene to contribute to each render pass. You can render an unlimited number of render passes, and then group them into logical groups called render pass sets. For more information about render passes, see Multi-render passes in the Maya User Guide.