Here is an overview of the components and concepts behind 3Delight for Maya.
3Delight Rendering Attributes
All rendering options for 3Delight for Maya can be edited in Maya's Render Settings dialog. Since all these options are stored by 3Delight for Maya as attributes, they can be edited in Maya's Attribute Editor as well. These attributes not only defines rendering options such as which render engine to use and image quality, they also specify the list of objects (or sets) to use for rendering. They are many rendering options neatly organised into five categories. See The Render Settings.
3Delight Render Pass
All the Rendering Attributes are encapsulated in what we call a Render Pass. This offers the possibility to have multiple Render Passes. 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 of rendering in the production pipeline. See The Render Pass.
3Delight Materials
3Delight for Maya comes with a set of handy physically-plausible HyperShade materials. See Materials and Shaders for a complete description.
3Delight Geometry Attributes
Geometry parameters specific to 3Delight for Maya are stored in The Geometry Attribute Node.
3Delight Light Attributes
3Delight for Maya supports all Maya light parameters and provides its own Light Attribute Nodes for specific parameters. For example, the deep shadow map type is selected through the Light Attribute Node as explained in How to produce 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 done using the RIB Archive Nodes. This is a handy feature when efficient rendering of complex scenes is required.