Short Contents

2. Overview

3Delight For Maya is a fully integrated Maya plug-in that let you render Maya scenes using the powerful 3Delight renderer. The plug-in is designed to be easy to use but integrates some features that are only used in modern RenderMan pipelines. The full list of features is listed in 3Delight For Maya Technical Specifications (included in the package).

Quick Start

To render a scene, one can simply:

Load the scene and the plug-in (using the Plug-in Manager).

Set the default renderer in the Render Globals to `3Delight'.

Start the render as usual.

Main Features and Components

In a nutshell, 3Delight for Maya offers the following features and components:

Pass oriented rendering: A render pass contains (among other things) options defining the objects and light being rendered, the rendering quality and the type of output produced. Render passes add flexibility on top of the standard Maya layers. See The Render Pass.
Hypershade shading network translation: 3Delight for Maya automatically translates Hypershade materials into RenderMan shaders, so scenes that work in Maya will work the same when using 3Delight For Maya.
RenderMan Shader Nodes: It is always possible to assign RenderMan shaders to scene elements. Assignment is done through the Shader Assignment Panel while the Attribute Editor is used to edit the shader parameters. RenderMan shaders override Hypershade materials.
Shader Collections: This feature enables the selection of a certain group of shaders depending on the pass being rendered. This adds flexibility to more advanced pipelines. Other packages also offer a per-pass assignment strategy but this additional indirection level let more advanced users easily manage shader to pass dependencies. See Shader Collections.
Geometry Attribute Nodes: These nodes are used to set various parameters that are specific to 3Delight, Examples are ray tracing attributes and motion blur attributes. See The Geometry Attribute Node.
Light Attribute Nodes: 3Delight For Maya honours all Maya light parameters and it provides its own attributes to set specific parameters. For example, the shadow map type (either normal or deep) is selected through the light attribute node. See The Light Attribute Node.
The Assignment Panel: This handy dialog is used to view and modify what shader node, attribute nodes and shader collections are assigned to the selected objects. See The Shader Assignment Panel.
RIB Archives: 3DELIGHT FOR MAYA can create and read RIB archives. This is a handy feature when efficient rendering of complex scenes is required. See The RIB Archive Node.
RenderMan Code Node: This advanced Hypershade node allows insertion of SL code (RenderMan Shading Language code) in a Hypershade network. See The RenderMan Code Node.

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