Maya® Studio Projects Texturing and Lighting

Anti-Aliasing Theory

By default, the Maya Software and mental ray renderers operate with draft anti-aliasing settings. When preparing high-quality renders, it's therefore important to understand how to adjust the anti-aliasing attributes.

Anti-aliasing is the process by which aliasing artifacts are reduced. Aliasing artifacts result when an image is constructed with a limited number of pixels. Even a large-resolution render suffers from aliasing problems. For example, a 2048×1556 render is limited to 3,186,688 pixels. Although 3 million pixels may seem like an excessive number, they may not be sufficient to reproduce all the fine detail found within a 3D scene (detail may stem from intricate geometry, textures, and/or lighting).

When a render ...