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:

Maya versions20132014201520162016.52017
Operating systemsWindows 64Linux 64macOS 64

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)
  • 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 CompositingPath 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() and trace() 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 surfacesNURBScurvespointsimplicit 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
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