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Specifies the rendering engine to use for rendering. The available options are the 'Path Tracer' (default) for the ray tracing based algorithm and the 'REYES' based algorithm. A discussion of Refer to the Pros and Cons of each is presented in the last section of this pageof Path Tracing vs REYES for a discussion of the advantages of each options.
Progressive Refinement
This option is only available when using the 'Path Tracer' Render Engine. When this toggle is turned on, the rendering rapidly shows a coarse image and refines it progressively until completed. This option is effective only for images outputted directly to a window on screen (i.e. to the Maya Render View or to 3Delight i-Display). During batch rendering (i.e. when using Maya Batch) this option is ignored. Note that this is not required when rendering in Maya IPR, which is progressive by nature and support dynamic edits of materials, lights and cameras.
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Progressive Refinement has a slight overhead in the order of 5-10%, depending on scene complexity and also produces images that may contain more noise / fireflies, therefore it should not be used for final renderings. Make sure to deactivate progressive refinement when rendering final frames submitted via RIB or with Maya runtime (as stated above, when using Maya Batch, progressive is always ignored). |
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When using Progressive Refinement, the Filter Type and Filter Width attributes (specified in the Quality group of rendering attributes) are ignored. A Box filter with a width of 1 is used instead. Because of this, your image rendered with this option may differ slightly from your final render using Maya Batch. |
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This option controls if the RIB file will be compressed, producing a smaller file. By default this option is off.Anchor
Pros and Cons of Path Tracing vs REYES
Path Tracing
Pros:
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Cons:
- Slower with displacements.
- Need more samples to render smooth (noise free) motion blur and depth of field. This happens because it is actually more precise than REYES and there is more detail in the motion blurred effect, but this also induces more noise.
- Increasing pixel samples (for aliasing and to reduce noise) has a direct impact on performance (though does not affect sampling of indirect illumination).
REYES
Pros:
- Extremely efficient rendition curved surfaces of average to large size — surfaces covering more than a few pixels on the image.
- High quality motion blur and depth of field are extremely fast. This is because the shading calculation is decoupled from hiding calculation.
- Displacements are rendered at a lesser cost than in path tracing (micro-polygons).
- Efficient at rendering fluids because of screen space under-sampling.
- Efficient rendering of millions of particles.
- Performance almost independent of oversampling (pixel samples). This makes it easy (and fast) to render images without noise and without aliasing.
Cons:
- Looses performance when rendering densely tessellated geometry (i.e. objects with a density of hundreds or thousands of surfaces covering just a few pixels).
- Not suited for rendering scenes with high "pixel complexity" (e.g. a crowd seen from afar).
- Motion blur shading is an approximation. For example, a spinning wheel will have its specular highlight blurred along with other details on the wheel, whereas the highlight should remain sharp.
- Takes more memory when used alongside ray tracing (for GI for example). This happens because we need ray tracing structures alongside REYES structures.
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