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 some features that are only used in modern RenderMan pipelines. The full list of features is listed in 3Delight For Maya Technical Specifications (included in the package).
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 Globals to ‘3Delight’
- Start the render as usual
Main Features and Components
In a nutshell, 3Delight for Maya offers the following features and components:
Pass oriented rendering
A render pass contains (among other things) options defining the objects and light being rendered, the rendering quality and the type of output produced. Render passes add flexibility on top of the standard Maya layers. See Section 3.9 [The Render Pass], page 55.
Hypershade shading network translation
3Delight for Maya automatically translates Hypershade materials into Render- Man shaders, so scenes that work in Maya will work the same when using 3Delight For Maya.
RenderMan Shader Nodes
It is always possible to assign RenderMan shaders to scene elements. Assign- ment is done through the Assignment Panel while the Attribute Editor is used to edit the shader parameters. RenderMan shaders override Hypershade materials.
Shader and Attribute Collections
This feature enables the selection of a certain group of shaders or attributes depending on the pass being rendered. This adds flexibility to more advanced pipelines. Other packages also offer a per-pass assignment strategy but this ad- ditional indirection level let more advanced users easily manage pass-dependant connections. See Section 5.1 [Understanding Collections], page 119.
Geometry Attribute Nodes
These nodes are used to set various parameters that are specific to 3Delight, Examples are ray tracing attributes and motion blur attributes. See Section 3.5 [The Geometry Attribute Node], page 16.
Light Attribute Nodes
3Delight For Maya honours all Maya light parameters and it provides its own attributes to set specific parameters. For example, the shadow map type (either normal or deep) is selected through the light attribute node. See Section 3.8 [The Light Attribute Node], page 47.
The Assignment Panel
This handy dialog is used to view and modify what shader node, attribute nodes and shader collections are assigned to the selected objects. See Section 3.2 [The Assignment Panel], page 10.
RIB Archives
3Delight For Maya can create and read RIB archives. This is a handy feature when efficient rendering of complex scenes is required. See Section 3.11 [The RIB Archive Node], page 97.
RenderMan Code Node
This advanced Hypershade node allows insertion of SL code (RenderMan Shad- ing Language code) in a Hypershade network. See Section 3.12 [The RenderMan Code Node], page 99.