Maya Legacy Viewport

Maya's legacy viewport is no longer supported. The following information is provided for reference purposes only. This topic has three sections:

Maya Hardware Renderer

For information on the render settings, see Render Settings window.

Quality

For more information about render speed and image quality, see Quality, render speed, diagnostics.

Presets

Use these settings as a starting point for rendering your image at a given quality and with a certain effect.

At higher quality settings, objects appear smooth, but may take more time to render. At lower quality settings, objects may appear a little more jagged, but render quickly.

Custom

Lets you specify the hardware quality settings independently.

Preview quality

The Number Of Samples is set to 1. Color resolution is set to 128.Bump resolution is set to 256.

Intermediate quality

The Number Of Samples is set to 1. Color resolution is set to 256. Bump resolution is set to 512.

Production quality

The Number Of Samples is set to 9. Color resolution is set to 512. Bump resolution is set to 1024.

Production quality with transparency

The Number Of Samples is set to 9. Color resolution is set to 512. Bump resolution is set to 1024. Allows for transparency.

Number Of Samples

Lets you select the exact number of samples per pixel used to control the anti-aliasing of objects during rendering.

For software rendering, each pixel is sampled first in the center, then slightly off center for subsequent samples. For hardware, each pixel is sampled in the center. For subsequent samples, the image is then re-rendered slightly offset, and each pixel is sampled in the center again. The images are then aligned to produce the final image.

Frame buffer format

A frame buffer is the video memory that holds the pixels from which the video display (frame) is refreshed. Select the type of frame buffer you want to use from the drop-down list:

Render Options
Culling

Lets you control the type of culling used for rendering.

Per object
The Culling option is based on the per object settings found in the Render Stats section of the selected object’s Attribute Editor. The current options are:
  • Double Sided renders double sided lighting with the current normals on the object.
  • Single Sided renders with single sided lighting with the current normals on the object.
  • Opposite renders with single sided lighting with the reversed normals on the object.
All Double Sided

Forces all objects to render using the All Double Sided option, whether or not you set that option on the object. All Single Sided offers better rendering performance than All Double Sided.

All Single Sided

Forces all objects to render using the All Singled Sided options whether or not you set that option on the object. If the Opposite suboption is enabled then that suboption is used. All Single Sided offers better rendering performance than All Double Sided.

Small object culling threshold

When this performance-improving option is enabled (default), opaque objects that are smaller than the specified threshold are not drawn.

This option provides the same functionality as the Occlusion Culling option found in High Quality Rendering mode in scene views.

Percent of image size

This is the threshold suboption for the Small Object Culling option. The threshold you provide is the percentage of the image size that an object occupies in the output image.

If an object is less than that percentage in size then it is not drawn. Size is measure in pixels in screen space (relative to the camera used for rendering). The default percentage is 0 percent.

This option ignores View->Camera Settings options (such as Gate and Fill options), which are used for image output only.

E.g. % = 10.0. Image size 100 by 100 (pixels). The threshold in pixels would be 100X100 * .10 = 1000 pixels. If an object was less than 1000 pixels in size then it would not be drawn.

E.g. % = 0.0 Image size 100 by 100 (pixels). The threshold in pixels would be 100X100 * 0 = 0 pixels. If an object was less than 0 pixels in size then it would not be drawn. This can occur when one opaque object completely obscures another object with respect to the current camera used for rendering.

Hardware geometry cache

Turn on this setting to cache geometry to your video card, when the video card memory is not being used elsewhere. In some cases, this can improve performance. You can set the Maximum cache size (in MB) if you want to limit the usage to a particular portion of the available video card memory, up to 512 MB.

Hardware Environment Lookup

Disable to interpret the Env Ball/Env Cube map in the same way as the Maya Software renderer.

Enable to interpret the Env Ball/Env Cube map according to the Maya Hardware Renderer.

Motion blur

If this option is on, you can change Motion Blur by Frame option and the Number of Exposures option.

Motion blur by frame

In the hardware renderer, motion blur is achieved by rendering the scene at specific points in time and blending the resulting sample renders into a single image.

Blur by frame represents the absolute time range, starting from the current frame, that is blurred. This determines the approximate start and end times of the blur. This time range is then adjusted in accordance with the camera’s Camera Shutter Angle attribute in the Attribute Editor.

Number of exposures

The number of exposures divides the above time range determined by the Motion Blur by Frame option into discrete moments in time, where the entire scene is re-rendered. The final image is the accumulated average of all the exposures. So to obtain a smooth blur, a larger number of exposures is desired. Similarly, for a motion trail, a smaller number of exposures is preferable.

Enable Geometry Mask

For hardware rendering. When this option is turned on, opaque geometry objects mask out particle objects, and transparent geometry is not drawn. This is especially useful when compositing particles over software-rendered geometry.

Blend Specular With Alpha

Enable this option to avoid the specular appearing as if it is floating on top of a surface. When this option is enabled, the specular is multiplied with the alpha and the resulting highlight only appears on the opaque surface and not the transparent surface.

Shadow linking

You can reduce the rendering time required for your scene by linking lights with surfaces so that only the specified surfaces are included in the calculation of shadows (shadow linking) or illumination (light linking) by a given light.

Use the drop-down list to select one of the three choices available with this option:

  • Shadows obey shadow linking
  • Shadows obey light linking
  • Shadows ignore linking

The shadows in your scene can obey only one of light linking or shadow linking and not both. Therefore, you must decide whether to incorporate light linking or shadow linking in your scene and make your selection from the drop-down list accordingly.

You can also render part of your scene using the default settings (instead of obeying the links that you have created). Select Shadows Ignore Linking so that all links that you have established or broken using shadow linking or light linking are ignored.

The default is set to Shadows Obey Light Linking.

See Shadow linking for more information regarding shadow linking. See Light linking for more information regarding light linking.

Legacy Viewport options

Select Renderer > Legacy High Quality Viewport > to open the Hardware Renderer Display Options window to set these options.

Display Quality

Low Quality Lighting

Low quality lighting is essentially per-vertex lighting, which calculates light only on vertices, then blends the results. Renders are faster and of reasonably good quality.

Match Viewport Lights

When turned on, only as many lights as are supported by the graphics card (typically 8 lights) are used.

Transparent Shadow Maps

Those regions of an object which are fully transparent will not cast a shadow. For example if you map the transparency channel of a shader (on an object) to a checker texture the fully transparent portions of the object would not cast a shadow.

Display Parameters

Occlusion Culling

This option improves performance for scenes with many objects, where one or more objects can be obscured from the viewpoint of the active camera. When turned on, this option increases performance by preventing out-of-view objects from being drawn.

Culling Override

Every position on a surface has a normal which points in the direction that is considered (for culling purposes) to be the "front side" of the surface.

  • Single sided means the surface is illuminated by a light if that normal is visible from the light.
  • Double sided means that the surface is illuminated on the front and the back sides.
    Color Texture Resolution

    If hardware rendering cannot process a shading network on board the graphics hardware, the shading network is evaluated and converted to a file texture (2D image) that the hardware renderer can use.

    This option specifies the dimension of the resulting texture. Affected channels are color, incandescence, ambient, reflected color, and transparency. The default value is 128, which means that any baked color images will have a dimension of 128 by 128 pixels.

    Bump Texture Resolution

    If hardware rendering cannot directly process a shading network on board the graphics hardware, the shading network is evaluated and converted to a file texture (2D image) that the hardware renderer can use.

    This option specifies the dimension of the resulting texture. The default value for this option is 256, which means that any baked bump images will have a dimension of 256 by 256 pixels.

Panel menu: Renderer

This Renderer menu displays above the scene view, or above each view panel in a layout with multiple scene views.

Select Renderer > Viewport 2.0 > to set the Viewport 2.0 options.

[Custom Renderer]

You can write your own plug-in and override the scene view renderer with the interactive renderer that you created. Once you have loaded your plug-in via the Plug-in Manager, the name of your custom renderer will appear under the Renderer Panel menu (for example, Renderer > openGLViewport Renderer). If you choose to load multiple custom renderers, they will be listed in the order that they are loaded.

Two example plug-ins have been provided with the SDK, one for OpenGL and one for Direct 3D. (Note that these example plug-ins have not yet been compiled and need to be compiled before they can be accessed via the Plug-in Manager.) For more details on API classes that can be used to create these plug-ins, see the Maya Developer Help.

Parent topic: Rendering Reference