FAQ | 3delight

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What kind of geometry does 3Delight for Maya support?

All Maya geometries can be rendered: polygons, NURBS, curves, particles, particle instances, nParticles, Maya Hair, Maya Fur, Maya Fluids, paint effects and hierarchical subdivision surfaces.

2. Does 3Delight for Maya support displacement?

Yes. Better yet, displacements are rendered at negligible performance cost. Both RenderMan displacement shaders and Hypershade displacement shaders are supported.

3. Can 3Delight for Maya render Maya Hair?

Yes. And very efficiently.

4. Can 3Delight for Maya render paint effects?

3Delight for Maya will efficiently render Paint Effects that uses thin curves using 3Delight's Curves. Paint Effects that have volume should be converted to polygons or NURBS before rendering with 3Delight.

5. Can 3Delight for Maya render Maya Fluid effects?

Yes. Only 3D fluids are supported.

6. Can 3Delight for Maya render to Maya's Render View?

Yes, by selecting the "maya_render_view" display driver in the render pass.

7. Can 3Delight for Maya use Hypershade?

Yes, 3Delight for Maya will automatically convert all your Hypershade shading networks into RenderMan Shading Language (RSL) shaders and use them for rendering to obtain a very similar appearance to Maya Software and MentalRay renderers. 3Delight for Maya supports more than 100 of the Maya and MentalRay built-in shader nodes. Note that the resulting RSL shader source code is also available for inspection or further manipulations.

8. Does 3Delight for Maya support multi-layer rendering?

3Delight for Maya has the most extensive support for layer rendering in the industry: not only one can have many render passes with different presets, but with each pass it is possible to render multiple layers simultaneously (diffuse color, specular color, etc.) as each pass can output many variables at once (into separate images) and have its own shader "collection".

9. Are shadow maps supported? And what about ray-traced shadows?

Yes, both normal and deep shadow maps are supported. Ray-traced shadows are also supported.

10. Are area lights with soft shadows supported?

Yes, by selecting ray-traced shadows.

11. Can 3Delight for Maya export RIB files?

Yes. In addition to its direct rendering capability, 3Delight for Maya has a very efficient RIB exporter. It is also possible to archive part of the scene for efficient rendering of more complex environments using delayed archives.

12. Does 3Delight for Maya come with a shader builder?

3Delight for Maya offers extensive support for Maya's Hypershade. This makes it possible to build complete RenderMan shaders using Maya's familiar user interface and built-in library of Hybershade nodes (more than 100 are supported). And by providing RSL shader files for custom Hypershade nodes, it is possible to further expand the Hypershade library. It is also possible to insert snippets of RenderMan Shading Language programing anywhere in an Hypershade shader using 3Delight for Maya's RenderMan Code node.

13. Should I enable hyper-threading for 3Delight to perform at its best?

On the more recent CPUs (such as the Intel Core i7) some of our clients have reported performance gains of up to 30% by enabling hyper-threading. But on older CPUs the gains were negligible, if any. So you may have to do rendering tests with and without hyper-threading on your computer and decide for yourself. Also consider that if hyper-threading is enabled, rendering will consume more memory and if you dont have enough, it may start to slow things down. So, if you encounter a situation where you are running low on memory and your computer starts swapping too much during rendering, you may want to try disabling hyper-threading (or as effectively and more simply tell 3Delight through the rendering options to use only half the cores during rendering).

14. Can I use the free license for commercial work?

Yes.

15. I have a few more licensing or pricing related questions, where should I ask?

Please, send us an email at sales@3delight.com. And you can also read this FAQ which answers additional questions about pricing and licensing.