In this scene there is a render layer, named KitchenSink, which includes a sink and a spotlight. The sink has a Phong shader applied to it and the spotlight’s Use Ray Trace Shadows attribute is enabled. Use the following simple workflow to obtain a diffuse, reflection, shadow and specular pass for this layer.
The multi-render pass feature is supported for the mental ray renderer. The rendering API allows other 3rd party renderers and custom renderers to support it moving forward.
Create render passes for the render layer
- With the KitchenSink layer selected, open the Render Settings window and select mental ray as your renderer.
- Select the
Passes tab and click the Create new render pass
button to create a new render pass. The
Create Render Passes
window appears.
- Select the following render passes. You can multi-select items:
Diffuse Without Shadows,
Reflection,
Shadow, and
Specular Without Shadows. Click the
Create and Close button. Four render passes named diffuseNoShadow, reflection, shadow, specularNoShadow are created and appear under the
Scene Passes section
Note: By default, a beauty pass is also created for the each layer once the selected passes have been created.
- Use the
button to move the passes to the
Associated Passes section. This makes the passes available to the current layer.
- Render the scene. By default, if you render from the scene view, your rendered images are saved to the subdirectory
<RenderLayer>\<camera>\<RenderPass> under the images\tmp directory of your project file. Maya also creates a MasterBeauty folder where it saves the default beauty pass for the scene. The image file name
<scene>.iff is used for each rendered image. If you batch render, the rendered images are saved directly to the
images directory.
Note: If you render using the Render View window, you can also preview your render pass output by selecting File > Load Render Pass.
Beyond this example
In addition to creating render passes for the entire render layer, you can also create render passes for a subset of the objects and lights in your render layer. You can do this by creating a render pass contribution map. See Creating render pass contribution maps for more information.
You can also customize the subfolders and filenames to which the rendered images are stored. See Creating subfolders and filenames for rendered images for more information.
If you have many render passes in your scene, you can group them into render pass sets, for example, an Illumination pass set that includes all passes involving lights, such as diffuse, and ambient. See Using render pass sets in your scene for more information.