2009

Table Of Contents
Using IPR
There are a few limitations to using IPR for fast visual feedback as you adjust
shading and lighting. Besides being unable to provide production-quality
anti-aliasing, IPR cannot display several other advanced display characteristics,
for example, true surface reflections (raytracing) and 3D motion blur. If an
advanced display characteristic seems to be missing from an IPR-rendered
frame, try rendering the frame with the software renderer.
If you change the camera view, turn Depth Map Shadows on or off, or
reposition shadows, IPR does not update the rendered image automatically.
You must refresh the image. From the Render View window, select IPR >
Refresh IPR Image.
Batch rendering
In this lesson, you used the Maya software renderer to check the image quality
of two frames before you started to batch render. When you create scenes with
sophisticated animation, its useful to batch render with low-quality resolution
to check the animation accuracy before batch rendering with
production-quality resolution. For instance, you might preview your animation
with the frames resulting from batch rendering at a small image size (320 by
240) with Preview Quality anti-aliasing.
You dont need to use the batch renderer to render single frames from your
scene to disk. From the Render View window, select File > Save Image.
Hardware rendering
Hardware rendering leverages the power provided by hardware graphics cards
to render your images. The benefits of hardware rendering include the ability
to batch render frames more quickly than with software rendering, and
rendering specific particle effects not possible through software rendering. In
some cases, the image quality may be good enough for final use. You access
the hardware renderer by selecting Render > Render Using > Maya Hardware.
Hardware rendering has its own limitations when compared to software
rendering. For more information on hardware rendering, see the Maya Help.
Rendering in layers
Its often useful to render objects in your scene in different layers and combine
them using compositing software. In some cases, you must render some optical
effects and then composite them afterwards. Rendering in layers can end up
being faster than rendering an entire scene, and it lets you replace individual
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