3Delight for Maya is a fully integrated Maya plug-in that lets you render Maya scenes using the powerful 3Delight rendering core. A wide support of all native Maya geometries, lighting, shading and FX features is provided. See Limitations for more details on what is currently unsupported. 3Delight for Maya is compatible with Maya versions 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 on all 64-bit platforms: Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.
The plug-in is designed to be easy to use and integrates all the features needed in modern production pipelines, for all the aforementioned versions of Maya:
- Path Tracing Global Illumination
- HDRI Image Based Lighting
- Physically/visually plausible BSDF-based materials, including a complete physical solution for hair
- Physical solution for Subsurface Scattering (SSS), with multiple and single scattering output
- Area Lights (including geometric area lights)
- Interactive Progressive Rendering (IPR) with scene edits support for cameras, lights and materials
- Integrated Volume Rendering of OpenVDB caches (compatible with OpenVDB 3.0)
- Full Color Management out of the box
- Network Cache for textures and archives
- UDIM texture support
- PTEX texture support
- Sub-Pixel Displacement (analytic, no pretessellation), with VDM support (ZBrush, Mudbox)
- Vertex Displacement
- Subdivision Surfaces (analytic, no pretessellation)
- Powerful scene elements (sets) and image layers AOV systems
- Multi-Light Output (per-light AOV of any component, of any light path) — requires Path Tracing
- Multi-Masks Output (output of any object/material masks)
- EXR (multi-channel) Image File Output
- Deep EXR Image File output supporting compression
- Spherical and Cylindrical camera projection rendering — requires Path Tracing
- Caustics (via Photon Mapping)
- Ability to choose REYES algorithm (see Pros and Cons of REYES vs Path Tracing)
- Ability to choose Point-Based Global Illumination and Point-Based Subsurface algorithm (typically for projects with lower pixel complexity)
- Efficient simultaneous Multi-Camera rendering — "Stereo" is the case with 2 cameras
- Anti-aliased Outline Rendering with per-variable AOV component detection
- i-Display: powerful image viewer with multi AOVs, Multi-Light mixer and 4K support
The 3Delight for Maya plug-in benefits from the powerful and unique features of the 3Delight rendering engine:
- Path Tracing (default) and REYES rendering mode
- High performance Volume Rendering (both in Path Tracing and REYES)
- Proprietary higher quality environment sampling
- Physically/visually plausible BSDF evaluation via the
bsdf() and trace() RSL functions, featuring the following BSDFs for direct and indirect lighting:
uniform, cosine, oren-nayar, blinn, ashikhmin-shirley, cook-torrance, ward, glass-ggx, hair - Transformation and Deformation Motion Blur with support for topological changes
- RSL1.0 / RSL2.0 Shading Language support with optimising compiler and very efficient last stage JIT compilation
- Procedural Geometry / Archives (with delayed or immediate loading)
- Dynamic Space Partitioning
- Full geometry support, without any tessellation, of higher order geometry such as: subdivision surfaces, NURBS, curves, points, implicit surfaces, constructive solid geometries (CSG), quadrics, patches...
- Massive instancing of geometry with tiny impact on memory footprint