Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Render layers
An important notion to keep in mind is that a CG image need not be created entirely in
a single render. Most of the time, it's better to composite different elements together to
form the final image. Professional CG workflow almost always requires multiple render
passes that are composited together later for the maximum in efficiency and quality.
Maya does a great job of making rendering in layers much easier with render layers.
As you saw earlier in this topic, using Display layers helps a lot in keeping your scene
organized. Render layers operate in basically the same way, although they function by
separating different elements of the scene into separate renders.
The functionality behind render layers is very powerful. We'll address the most basic
and commonly utilized here: separating objects into different renders. You'll select ele-
ments in a scene and assign them to different render layers. When you batch-render the
scene, Maya will render each of the layers separately and save the files into their own
subfolders in the Images folder of your current project. You'll then need to load all the dif-
ferent rendered layers into a compositing program, such as Apple Shake or Adobe After
Effects, and composite the layers together.
Render Passes in mental ray
Two powerful features in mental ray rendering, Render Passes and Pass Contribution
Maps, make rendering in layers much more efficient. This mental ray-specific workflow
is fairly advanced and requires an existing knowledge of rendering as well as rendering in
simple passes (such as you did with render layers) to grasp fully. As such, we won't cover
these features in this topic; however, you should be aware of this mental ray rendering
pipeline as you move beyond this introduction and continue rendering with mental ray
in your own work.
Rendering the Still life in layers
In this example, you'll separate a scene into different layers for rendering with Maya
Software rendering.
To separate a scene into different layers, follow these steps:
1. Open the still life scene ( still_life_v02.mb from the Scenes folder of the Lighting
project on the CD) to start there. The lights and a camera are already set up in this
scene. Set your camera view to camera1. Open Render Settings, and make sure Maya
Software is the current renderer and not mental ray.
2. Separate the scene into different renders. To do so, in the Layer Editor, click the Ren-
der tab to switch to the render-layers view. Select the foreground lemon, and click the
Create New Layer and Assign Selected Objects icon ( ). This creates a new render
layer called layer1 and assigns the lemon to it. (See Figure 11.42.)
Search WWH ::




Custom Search