The Render Pass

Overview

The main paradigm in 3delight For Maya is the render pass. Simply put, a render pass is a rendering context that encapsulates a list of rendering attributes and a list (or set) of objects to be rendered. A single Maya scene can contain any number of such passes and each one can be rendered independently with possibly different outputs.

Although it is not necessary to have multiple render passes (the simplest rendering setup contains only one pass), having the possibility to use many such passes gives increased flexibility and enables a better integration of rendering in the production pipeline. As an example, rendering passes could be used to:

• Have multiple rendering quality levels. It is usual to have a render pass with settings for a draft render and another one for high quality renders
• Split rendering of different objects in the scene (such as foreground and background objects) between different passes. In this case, a render pass is equivalent to the rendering of a layer which might be composited in a compositing software later in the pipeline
• Make a render output a different set of output variables. A rendering could for example output surface normals for later processing*.