What's New in Rendering in Maya 2017 Update 3

New Viewport 2.0 features

Native support for OSD 3.1

Native support for OSD 3.1 now allows modelers and animators to preview the actual shape and surface of adaptive openSubdiv geometry. For example, see the real time results when sculpting an adaptive openSubdiv mesh or view creases in the mesh while animating.

Improved Displacement Preview workflow

Previewing the results of a displacement map in Viewport 2.0 is now easier. Toggle Displacement Preview on and off using the new Alt + 3 hotkey to minimize workflow interruptions. Or, enable the new Displacement Preview attribute in the object's shape node Smooth Mesh attribute group.

When displace preview is turned on, all the required Smooth Mesh attributes are automatically set so you can see the displacement map results right away.

Note that the new Displacement Preview replaces the Show Displacement attribute.

• Preview the displacement results
• Smooth Mesh

Shadow and shading support

Maya 2017 Update 3 adds a number of previously unsupported viewport effects for lighting and shading including the following:

• Shadows and screen space ambient occlusion are now supported for the OpenSubdiv Catmull-Clark Adaptive subdivision method and for displaced meshes.
• Point lights now support shadows.
• Support for complex shading networks on displaced surfaces. This includes real time preview of ramps, color changes, and multi-tiled UV textures. Adjust attributes on the shading network and preview the results right-away.
• OpenSubdiv adaptive and displacement meshes can now receive and cast shadows.

Improved Transparency

Transparency has been improved in Viewport 2.0 with the addition of a new Alpha Cut transparency algorithm. Alpha Cut provides high quality transparency and accurate object sorting without performance trade-offs.

This algorithm is ideal for quickly rendering foliage as well as light-weight objects for the purposes of pre-visualization or low LOD stand-ins.

See Viewport 2.0 Options.

Other improvements

When accessing Maya through Windows Remote Desktop, Maya automatically switches the Viewport 2.0 Rendering engine to DirectX 11 mode for the remote session. If your Viewport 2.0 Rendering engine is set to an OpenGL setting (in the Preferences window), Maya posts a message to the status line to inform you of the change.

New Render Setup features

When creating a Render Settings override, the Property Editor now indicates the node to which it is applied, which may be helpful if you create overrides on two or more attributes with the same name on different nodes.

Overridden attributes now appear in orange in the Attribute Editor and Render Settings window for easy identification.

You can now create overrides on a locked attribute using drag and drop.

New input space rules for color management

By default, there are two new preset rules in the Color Management preferences. These assign files with .hdr and .exr extensions to the Raw input color space. Note that these rules are not available if you have previously saved preferences for Maya 2017.