Overview
An important paradigm in 3delight for Maya is the Render Pass. Simply put, a Render Pass is a rendering context that encapsulates a list of rendering options and a list (or set) of objects to be rendered. All 3Delight for Maya does is encapsulated all the these options (listed in the The Render Settings window) inside a Render Pass node. It is then possible to create many such nodes and specify and edit the one we want to use for rendering. A single Maya scene can contain any number of such passes. Each one is rendered independently with possibly very different outputs.
Although it is not necessary to have multiple Render Passes (the simplest rendering setup contains only one pass), having the possibility to use many such passes gives increased flexibility of rendering in the production pipeline. As an example, rendering passes could be used to:
- Have multiple rendering quality levels. It is usual to have a Render Pass with settings for a draft render and another one for high quality render.
- Split rendering of different objects in the scene (such as foreground and background objects) in different passes. In this case, a Render Pass is equivalent to the rendering of a layer which might be composited in a compositing software later in the pipeline.
- Have a one or more passes setup to generate some texture maps (or shadow maps) and another pass to use these maps for the final image.
The Render Settings window present a menu to select which Render Pass is active. All the rendering attributes for the active Render Pass are displayed right below (grouped by categories), just like they are in the Attribute Editor.
Render Settings window
The set of tools to manage Render Passes is explained in details in Managing Render Passes. Here is a description of the two items in the Render Settings window for selecting and creating a Render Pass:
Active Render Pass
This menu lists all Render Passes currently in the scene. Select one to make it active and display all its attributes right below. The active one is used when launching renderings using the various menu items and shelf buttons. It is also the one used when rendering using Maya's Render command line (see Batch Rendering). By default there is only one Render Pass and it is named 'renderPass'.
Create Render Pass
The Create Render Pass button creates a new Render Pass and sets it as the Active Render Pass.