2009

Hardware rendering particles
In 3D animation, rendering typically refers to the act of creating a sequence
of high-quality image snapshots for each frame of an animation sequence.
After rendering the images, you play them in sequence to create a film or
video clip. If the concept of 3D animation rendering is new to you, consider
doing the lesson
Lesson 1: Rendering a scene on page 377 before completing
this section.
You cannot render most particle render types, including streaks, with Maya’s
software renderer. You must hardware render the particles.
Hardware rendering uses your computer’s graphics hardware to render a scene
to disk and monitor faster than software rendering. Hardware rendering
generally displays surface shading and textures less accurately than software
rendering, so most people use it only to render particle effects.
In the following steps, you test render the last frame of the scene to make sure
the particles look satisfactory. Next, you render the entire frame sequence to
disk and then play the rendered images with the flipbook feature.
To test render the scene
1 Select Window > Rendering Editors > Hardware Render Buffer. This
displays a window from which you hardware render the scene.
2 In the Hardware Render Buffer, go to the start frame and click the play
button. Stop the animation at frame 75.
You must play the particle animation from the beginning in order for
particle effects to be displayed correctly at each frame. You cannot go
directly to an arbitrary frame in the Time Slider and see correct results.
Maya calculates particle animation sequentially frame-by-frame.
3 In the Hardware Render Buffer, select Render > Test Render.
Hardware rendering particles | 491