Maya Rendering - Introducing Maya 2011 - page 511

a resolution from the Presets drop-down list box. The commonly used resolution for pro-
fessional broadcast is 720 × 486 National Television Standards Committee (NTSC), which
appears as CCIR 601/Quantel NTSC in the Presets list. To composite Maya CG into a
home-shot digital video (DV) movie, you use the standard DV resolution of 720 × 480 to
render your scene, but you must enter that resolution manually in the Width and Height
fields. (For more on resolutions, see Chapter 1.)
The Device Aspect Ratio and Pixel Aspect Ratio attributes adjust the width of the
image to accommodate certain professional output needs; you need not adjust them here.
Make sure your Pixel Aspect Ratio attribute is set to 1 before you render, unless you need to
render CCIR 601/Quantel NTSC or DV for television needs; otherwise, your image may look
squeezed or widened compared to any live-action footage you use to composite.
The higher your resolution, the longer the scene will take to render. Doubling the
resolution may quadruple the render time. With large frame sequences, it's advisable to
render tests at half the resolution of the final output or less to save time.
In addition to the image resolution, the image quality of a render also dictates how
long a render will take. In addition to turning down the resolution for a test, you can use
a lower-quality render. Each rendering method has its own set of quality settings, which
are explained in the following sections.
Selecting a Render Engine
Maya allows you to select a render engine in the Render Settings window. Although men-
tal ray for Maya is most commonly used, the other rendering methods give you flexibility
in choosing a final look for your project.
Maya Software
Maya Software, the default software rendering method, can capture just about everything
you want in your scene, from reflections to motion blur and transparencies. You can use
the software rendering method in a couple of ways.
USInG RAyTRACInG
Raytracing, a topic introduced in Chapter 10, “Maya Lighting,” is used to incorporate two
optical effects into a rendering that the default software rendering method can't handle.
Raytracing traces rays of light from each light source to every object in the shot and then
traces the light's reflection from the object to the camera's lens. This allows true reflec-
tions and refractions to appear in the render as well as highly defined shadows (for more
on shadows, see Chapter 10):
True Reflections True reflections occur when every object in the scene is viewed in a
reflective surface, as a reflection of course. You can also have objects with reflections