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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()

•  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 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