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 Globals 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.
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.