Introducing Maya® 2008

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to set up your scene for rendering. Starting with the Ren-

der Settings window and moving onto the different render engines available, you learned

how to render your scene for a particular look. Then we covered how to preview your ren-

der and how to use IPR for fast scene feedback. We moved onto how to render reflections

and refractions, how to create and use cameras, and how to render motion blur. You

tested your skill on a wine bottle scene and, to batch-render it out into a sequence of

images, you checked it in a program such as FCheck. Then you used Maya’s render layers

and rendering and an Ambient Occlusion pass to increase reality in your renders. Finally,

you applied this knowledge to rendering the Red Rocket.

Getting to this point in a scene can take some work, but once you see the results playing

back on your screen, the work all seems more than worth it. Nothing is more fulfilling

than seeing your creation come to life, and that’s what rendering is all about. But don’t

consider the rendering process a mere push-button solution when planning your anima-

tions. Always allow enough time to ensure that your animations render properly and at

their best quality. Most beginners seriously underestimate the time needed to properly

complete this step in CG production.

After you create numerous scenes and render them out, you’ll begin to understand how

to construct your next scenes so that they render better and faster. Just be sure to keep on

top of your file management. Rendering can produce an awful lot of files, and you don’t

want to have them scattered all over the place.

For those curious about different workflows, the Red Rocket project was also used in the

book Introducing 3ds Max 2008: 3D for Beginners. In this book, you will be able to see how the

rocket was modeled in polygons and lit and rendered through 3ds Max.

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