All the 3Delight rendering options and stored as attributes and encapsulated inside Render Pass nodes. T Render Settings first present a menu to select which Render Pass to view. The rendering options for the selected Render Pass are displayed right after, just like they are in the Attribute Editor. By default there is only one Render Pass.

The Current Render Pass option menu lists all render pass nodes currently in the scene. The selected one is used for all renderings launched using Render Current Frame or Batch Render options of Maya’s Render menu. The Create Render Pass button on the right of the option menu creates a new render pass node and set it as the one selected for the Current Render Pass attribute.

Overview

An important 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 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) in 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.
• Have a one or more passes setup to generate some texture maps (or shadow maps) and the following pass use these maps in the final image.