Here is an overview of the components and concepts behind 3Delight for Maya.
3Delight Render Settings
All rendering options for 3Delight for Maya can be edited in Maya's Render Settings dialog. Since all these options are stored by 3Delight for Maya as attributes, they can be edited in Maya's Attribute Editor as well. These attributes not only defines rendering options (such as sampling, filtering, etc.), they also specify the list of objects to use for rendering. The rendering options are neatly organised into five categories. See The Render Settings.
3Delight Render Pass
Since 3Delight for Maya encapsulated all the options of the Render Settings into what we call Render Pass, it it possible to save and name multiple sets of Render Settings. Although it is not necessary to have more than one, having the possibility to define multiple render settings gives increased flexibility in the production pipeline. See The Render Pass.
3Delight Materials
3Delight for Maya comes with a set of handy physically-plausible HyperShade materials. See Materials and Shaders for a complete description.
3Delight Attributes
3Delight for Maya defines additional attributes on some Maya nodes. See The 3Delight Attributes of Maya Nodes for a complete description.
3Delight for Maya is a fully integrated Maya plug-in that let you render Maya scenes using the powerful 3Delight renderer. The plug-in is designed to be easy to use but integrates all the features used in modern pipelines (Global Illumination, Re-lighthing, EXR File, Deep Image Files, ...).
Quick Start
To render a scene, one can simply:
- Load the scene and the plug-in (using the Plug-in Manager)
- Set the default renderer in the Render Settings to ‘3Delight’
- Start the render as usual
Main Components
In a nutshell, 3Delight for Maya offers the following components:
A render pass contains a set of information defining the elements being rendered, the rendering quality and options and the type of output produced. Render passes add flexibility on top of the standard Maya layers.
These nodes are used to set some parameters that are specific to 3Delight.
3Delight for Maya honours all Maya light parameters and it provides its own attributes to set specific parameters. For example, the deep shadow map type is selected through the light attribute node as explained in Deep Shadow Maps.
RenderMan Shader Nodes
It is possible to assign RenderMan shaders to scene elements (this will override any Hypershade material assignment). Assignment is done through the Assignment Panel or the The 3Delight Relationship Editor while the Attribute Editor is used to edit the shader parameters.
3Delight for Maya can create and read RIB archives. This is a handy feature when efficient rendering of complex scenes is required.
This advanced Hypershade node allows insertion of SL code (RenderMan Shad- ing Language code) in a Hypershade network.