Rendering Options Breakdown

This page is designed as a supplement to lectures. It is not intended to be a stand alone tutorial.

Getting the visual effects you want in your renders, plus having them render efficiently requires understanding where all the rendering options lie and how they relate to each other. Following is a quick breakout list of the most frequently used options for rendering. Images from the class demo follow with a few reminders

• Maya, Mental Ray, Toon, Hardware
• Size of image, alpha channel, aspect ration, name, file extension, padding
• Raytracing On or Off
  • Overall Reflections, Refractions, and Shadows limits
• Render Quality Settings (anti-aliasing, shading samples, etc)
• Overall Motion Blur

• Lights
  • Light Linking
  • Fog
  • Shadows
    • Depth Map
      • Size of Map, sample, softness
      • Rebuild or Reuse Maps
      • Mental Ray Detail Map
    • Raytrace Shadows
      • Light Radius, Shadow Rays
  • Glow, Halos, Lens Flares
• Shaders
  • Surface Information (color, bump, reflection, specular, shininess, etc)
  • Raytrace Options
    • Refractive Index
    • Refraction Limit (Global settings override this local setting)
    • Reflection Limit (Global settings override this local setting)
  • Mental Ray
    • Irradiance
    • Reflection and Refraction Blur
  • Glow
• Object
  • Tessellation
  • Render Stats
    • Cast Shadows
    • Receives Shadows
    • Visibility
      • Primary
      • In Reflections
      • In Refractions
    • Motion Blur
• Camera
  • Clipping Planes
  • Depth of Field
  • Shutter Angle for Motion Blur
  • Environment Background

This is the default Maya render. Raytracing is not activated so there are no reflections or refractions. The default Maya Depth Map Shadows have been turned on. You can see the artifacts of the 512 resolution. Also, depth map shadows cannot render transparency, so the shadow of the glass torus is solid.
Raytracing and raytraced shadows have been turned on. Note that the shadow of the glass torus is now accurate. Refraction for the glass shadow has not been turned on so it simply looks transparent. Notice that the reflections in the balls do NOT have shadows. This is because the shadow limit is set to one. This means that shadows only are "bounced" once. When a shadow is in a reflection, that requires at least two "bounces."
Under the spotlight for this scene, the shadow limit has now been increased to 2. This allows the shadows to be seen in the reflections.
Refraction has been turned on in the shader of the glass. You can see how the glass is effecting the bending of the light as it goes through the glass. However, the refraction limit is only set at 2, thus the ray is traced only through 2 surfaces. In the center, there are 4 surfaces that the light has to go through, so those sections are black.
The Refraction limit has been increased to 6. Now the rays are going completely through the object.
In this example the Primary Visibility for the Yellow Post object has been turned off. It does not render. However, it still is casting its shadow and it appears in reflections.

UMBC Department of Visual Arts, Advanced Maya Courses, Dan Bailey