Maya Rendering Guides

Render Globals Settings

There are a few other things we need to set in the Render Globals dialog box. This dialog box offers many settings, but for now, we will set the quality, the output filename and format, and some frame rendering details.

1. Select Window > Render Globals and open the Anti-aliasing Quality section. Set the Presets option to Intermediate Quality. You can change this setting to Production Quality when you are ready to render, but for test renders, the Preview or Intermediate Quality settings are usually good enough.

Tip For production quality or higher quality anti-aliasing presets, Maya automatically turns on the Multipixel Filtering setting. Multipixel Filtering is good for situations where you see thin surface edges. If there are no thin edges to anti-alias, itns best to have this option turned off, because it can slow down the rendering process significantly.

1. Open the Image File Output section and type in a name for the picture sequence you will be rendering in the File Name Prefix field. If you donnt enter a name, the rendered pictures will automatically be assigned the scene filename.
2. Set Frame/Animation Ext to name.#.ext. The animation settings become activated. If you leave the setting at name.ext, then only the current time frame will be rendered.
3. Set End Frame to 60, because we will be rendering two seconds of animation.
4. The default Image Format is Maya IFF (iff) picture format. Change it to something more widely acceptable, like the Targa (tga) format.
5. Set the Camera to Cam_1 to make it the renderable camera. Before closing the Render Globals dialog box, check to make sure you have the settings shown below.

Formats such as JPEG or GIF are usually not used as image formats, because they do not carry alpha channel (mask) information, which is often needed for compositing purposes, and they compress the pixel information of the output, which may lower the picture quality.

Note Regular color pictures have 24 bits of color information for each pixel, stored in three RGB (red, green, blue) channels. A picture with an alpha channel has an extra 8-bit channel, which contains the masking information for each pixel of the picture. The information is stored in the form of a grayscale picture, which often turns out to be the outline of the objects being rendered.

By default, Maya renders the RGB channels and the alpha channel. You can also render the depth channel (Z-depth) by checking the Channels box. Z-depth is similar to the alpha channel in that it is represented as an 8-bit grayscale picture. As its name indicates, it stores the depth information of pixels to be rendered. As with the alpha channel, it is mainly used for compositing purposes. If the image format is the default .iff, then the Z-depth information is stored inside the image file being rendered, like other alpha channel information. If you are rendering in a format like .tga, Maya creates a separate Z-depth file for every image it renders.

The Renderable Objects setting is set to Render All by default, but you can switch it to Render Active if you want, which will only render what youDve selected. Using the Render Active option is useful if you are rendering in layers.

Tip In the Render Globals dialog box, you see Cam_1 as the camera available for rendering. If you want to render multiple cameras, Cam_1 and persp, for example, open the persp camerans Attribute Editor, go to the Output Settings section, and turn on Renderable. Now if you go to the Render Globals dialog boxns Image File Output section and look at the Camera menu, you will see that both Cam_1 and persp are identified as Renderable.