The exact workflow steps and the order in which you perform them vary. Rendering is an iterative process in which you tweak lights, textures, and cameras; adjust various scene and object settings; visualize your changes; then, when you are satisfied with the results, render your final images.
Once you have completed shading and texturing objects, adding lights, and adding renderable cameras to your scene, you can render your scene. The following workflow outlines the typical steps.
- Decide which renderer you want to use:
- For detailed information about each of Maya’s renderers, see Maya Software renderer, Maya Hardware 2.0 renderer, Arnold for Maya renderer, and Maya Vector renderer.
- To select a renderer, see Select a renderer.
- Click
in the status line to open the
Render Settings window, and adjust the scene settings for the renderer you selected.
In this window, you can set the file name, format, and resolution of your rendered images, as well as adjust the quality settings for your render output. For example, you may want to use lower quality settings for preview rendering, and higher quality settings for the final rendered images.
- Divide your scene into render layers using the render setup system (optional).
See Render setup in Maya.
- Test render your scene iteratively to visualize the changes you make to materials, textures, lights, cameras, and objects.
- To visualize your textures, bump maps and materials as you adjust your shader network, see Look development using the Hypershade.
- To visualize lighting, shadows and other changes to your scene in real-time, see Viewport 2.0.
- To visualize scene adjustments interactively while software rendering, see Visualize interactively with IPR.
- When you are satisfied with the results, render the final images.
- Render a single frame.
- Render a sequence of frames interactively.
- See
Render from the command line.
Note: When working on the Linux platform and rendering with the Maya Software renderer, you may choose to send the (rendering) output messages to a file instead of to the shell. Use the command maya >& logfile. A file with the name logfile is created and all output messages are saved to this file upon rendering in Maya.