3Delight for Maya is a fully integrated Maya plug-in that lets you render Maya scenes using the powerful 3Delight rendering engine. A wide support of all native Maya geometries, lighting, shading and FX features is provided. See Limitations for more details on what is currently unsupported. 3Delight for Maya is compatible with:
The 3Delight for Maya plug-in is designed to be easy to use and integrate all the features needed in modern production pipelines:
- Production grade Path Tracing with highly optimized multi-bounce global illumination
- Programmable shaders with ability to easily deploy custom RSL and OSL shaders in Maya
- HDRI Image Based Lighting with higher quality environment sampling
- Physically/visually plausible BSDF-based materials, including:
- a general purpose, dual-layer, PBR material (3Delight Material)
- a physical solution for (human) skin (3Delight Skin)
- a complete physical solution for hair (3Delight Hair), simulating primary reflections (R), secondary reflections (TRT), light multiple scattering and transmission through the hair fibers (TT) and glints
- a physical glass material (3Delight Glass)
- a physical metallic material with easy controls (3Delight Metal)
- Area Lights (support of builtin Maya Area Light and arbitrary geometric area lights)
- Progressive final frame rendering (using the same engine as final frame rendering: and converging to virtually the same results)
- Interactive Progressive Rendering (IPR) with scene edits support for: cameras, lights and materials
- Integrated Volume Rendering of OpenVDB caches (compatible with OpenVDB 3.0+)
- Fully automatic Color Management
- LRU Network Cache for textures and archives — requires 3Delight Studio Pro
- UDIM texture support (with Mari-style UDIM tile mapping by default)
- PTEX texture support
- Sub-Pixel Displacement (analytic, no pretessellation), with support for both scalar and vector displacement (typically from ZBrush, Mudbox, Mari)
- Optional Vertex Displacement (for large displacements & VDMs)
- Infinitely-smooth analytic* subdivision surfaces with support for edge and vertex subdivision creases — (* no pre-tessellation)
- Real round corners on polygon meshes via subdivision surfaces
- Powerful scene elements (sets) and image layers AOV systems
- Multi-Light Output (lights, light groups, incandescent geometry, environment light) for Physically-Based Compositing — Path Tracing only
- Multi-Mask Output (masks for objects, materials, or both)
- EXR (multi-channel) image file output
- High performance Deep EXR image file output supporting highly efficient compression
- Efficient simultaneous Multi-Camera rendering — Stereo / VR is the case with 2 cameras
- Spherical, Cylindrical and Fisheye camera projection rendering, compatible with multi-camera rendering — Path Tracing only
- Physical Lens Shaders — Path Tracing only
- Caustics (via Photon Mapping or forward path tracing in OSL)
- Anti-aliased, sub-sampled, Outline Rendering with per-variable AOV component detection and varying color/width/depthfade
- A powerful system to assign shader collections and shader overrides.
- 3Delight Display (a-k-a "i-display"), a powerful cross-platform interactive image viewer with:
- multi AOVs
- HDPI support
- Multi-Light Mixer
- OpenColorIO color profiles
- "half" datatype support
- 4K playback support at 60fps
- statistic display
- Ability to choose the legacy REYES algorithm (typically for projects with lower pixel complexity) (see Pros and Cons of REYES vs Path Tracing)
- Ability to choose the legacy Point-Based Global Illumination and Point-Based Subsurface algorithm (typically for projects with lower pixel complexity)
The 3Delight for Maya plug-in benefits from the powerful and many unique features of the 3Delight rendering engine:
- Unidirectional, multi bounce, forward Path Tracing (default), using either the RSL or the OSL shading framework
- Legacy REYES rendering mode, using the RSL shading framework
- High performance Volume Rendering with support of OpenVDB 3.0
- Proprietary, higher quality, environment sampling
- Physical solution (interactive, no pre-computation) for Subsurface Scattering (SSS) using the
subsurface()shadeop, with multiple and single scattering output and ability to resolve small geometric detail. - Physically/visually plausible BSDF evaluation via the
bsdf()andtrace()RSL functions, featuring the following BSDFs for direct and indirect lighting:uniform, cosine, oren-nayar, blinn, ashikhmin-shirley, cook-torrance, ward, ggx (glass-ggx), gtr (glass-gtr), hair - Transformation and Deformation Motion Blur with support for topological changes
- Advanced OSL (Open Shading Language) support with full support of both closures and patterns in path tracing.
- RSL1.0 / RSL2.0 Shading Language support with optimizing compiler and very efficient last stage JIT compilation
- Procedural Geometry / Archives (with delayed or immediate loading)
- Dynamic Space Partitioning
- RIB I/O — feature available with 3Delight Studio Pro
- Distributed Rendering — feature available with 3Delight Studio Pro
- Full geometry support, without any tessellation, of higher order geometry such as: subdivision surfaces, NURBS, curves, points, implicit surfaces, constructive solid geometries (CSG), quadrics, patches...
- Massive instancing of geometry with tiny impact on memory footprint
- Bake to texture (bake2d) and bake to pointcloud (bake3d) functionalities