Maya® Professional Tips and Techniques

Chapter 9. Advanced Rendering Techniques

BASIC RENDERING TECHNIQUES produce 8-bit, Low Dynamic Range (LDR) images. Yet Maya supports 16-bit and 32-bit floating-point High Dynamic Range (HDR) images for texturing, lighting, and rendering. You can render OpenEXR and .hdr image formats with the mental ray renderer, thus achieving dynamic ranges that approach those found in the natural world. In addition, you can import HDR bitmaps and apply them as textures; if the textures are rendered with mental ray, the full dynamic range is preserved. Better yet, you can light a scene with Final Gather and any LDR or HDR bitmap. Other advanced tools allow you to import normal maps, create normal maps with low- and high-resolution models, and make and break shadow ...