3Delight For Maya is our plug-in for Maya users wishing to create high quality work that is sometimes difficult to achieve using Maya's internal renderer. The plug-in was designed to be easy to use for Maya artists as well as provide the necessary power and flexibility for the more demanding production environments.



Users can rapidely experience the power of the 3Delight renderer in their projects thanks to HyperShade support, complete geometry support and direct rendering to Maya's render view. Advanced features include multi-pass work-flow, RIB output, MEL RenderMan® binding, multiple output variables, photon mapping, etc ...

This tool has already a wealth of production experience and has been used with success in productions such as X-Men 3, Chronicles of Narnia and Fantasic Four.



Rendering Features

Two Render Modes

Both direct rendering in Maya (including rendering into Maya's render view) and RIB export are supported. Direct rendering is useful in normal lighting and rendering work while RIB export can be used for render farm rendering. RIBs exported by 3Delight For Maya are optimized for size and can be written in compressed binary form.



HyperShade and RenderMan Shaders Support

Both RenderMan shaders and Maya's HyperShade nodes can be assigned to objects. HyperShade nodes are automatically converted into human-readable SL code and compiled for rendering. New HyperShade nodes can easily be added by providing 3Delight For Maya with their SL code.



Motion Blur and Depth of Field

Multi-Segment motion blur and realistic camera shutter simulation contribute to high quality rendered images. Compared to other rendering software, motion blur in 3Delight For Maya is fast. Depth of field is fully supported and simulates a realistic camera bokeh.

High Quality Anti-Aliasing



Edge anti-aliasing, motion blur and depth of field quality are all controlled using very simple and predictable controls. "Pixel Samples", "Pixel Filter" and "Filter Width" are the most common parameters one needs to know. Contrary to other rendering packages, such as ray tracers, increasing pixel samples for higher quality anti-aliasing does not affect performance significantly.



Geometric Displacements

Displacements are efficiently rendered to sub-pixel accuracy. Hypershade displacement shaders as well as RenderMan shaders can be assigned to geometry.

Shadows

Both ray tracing and shadow maps can be used to render shadows. Shadow maps can be rendered in "deep" mode for realistic shadows in hair and fur. Additionally, 3Delight For Maya can automatically generate "cube shadow maps" for point lights. Contrary to other rendering packages, cube shadow maps are not stored as six separate shadow maps but in one special shadow map.



Ray Tracing

Reflections and refractions are accurately rendered.

Global Illumination



Photon maps, caustics, final gathering and image based lighting are supported.

Subsurface Scattering



Automatic subsurface scattering can be enabled on a per-object basis and delivers impressive results, fast.

Workflow

3Delight For Maya offers a multi-pass rendering workflow that is suitable for production work. "Render Passes" can be used to render different components of a scene (as in "Render Layers" or to render different lighting characteristics of a scene (such as diffuse, specular or ambient occlusion). In short, a render pass can define the following parameters (please refer to the User's Manual for a thorough description):

Camera and quality options

Render mode. Either direct render or RIB export.

Objects to render. Maya sets can be used to define groups of objects to render in a given pass. The default is to render all objects in the scene.

Light sources to render. Maya sets can be used to define the light sources that are used. The default is to use all light sources.

Clipping planes to use. A 3Delight For Maya clipping plane can cut space in any desired direction to clip away geometry. Clipping is performed at sub-pixel accuracy and can be used, for example, to cut an object in two.



Additionally, a given render pass can use a certain "shader collection." This means that objects can have different shaders assigned to them, depending on the pass being rendered. The User's Manual provides more information about this unique feature. Note that one could simply use one render pass for the more traditional one layer rendering.



Supported Geometry

Maya Hair and Paint Effects



Rendered using 3Delight's efficient `RiNuCurves' primitive.

Polygons



All types of polygons, including those with holes, are supported. Additionally, polygonal geometry can be tagged as a subdivision surface and rendered as such.

NURBS (Maya surfaces)



All NURB surfaces are supported. Trim curves on surfaces are also fully supported and rendered to sub-pixel accuracy. All surfaces are rendered smooth.

Hierarchical Subdivision Surfaces



Fully supported, including both creasing and partial creasing on edges and vertices as well as per-level UV sets. As always, all hierarchical subdivisions are rendered smooth and to sub-pixel accuracy.

Particles



"Point", "blobby", "sphere" and "patch" particles are supported. "Point" particles are rendered using 3Delight's efficient lightweight particle primitive.

Curves



Maya curves can be tagged as renderable on a per object basis and rendered using 3Delight's RiNuCurves primitive.



Additionally, UV sets, texture reference objects and normals (if any) are correctly assigned to all primitives.



Configurability and Flexibility

As with all serious production tools, 3Delight For Maya has been designed with flexibility in mind. In fact, no other rendering plug-in on the market achieves the same balance between integration and configurability.

We implemented most of the RenderMan interface in MEL, which means that you can call RenderMan commands in your MEL scripts. Other packages mainly provide "RIB boxing" capability.

3Delight For Maya was written mostly using the MEL RenderMan interface which means that one can modify it at will. Only core functionalities have been programmed in C++ for performance reasons.



Import and Export

Output Formats



3Delight For Maya can save rendered images in many file formats, including: TIFF, IFF, OpenEXR, cineon, bmp, sgi, softimage and PSD.



Input Formats

Maya's textures used in HyperShade shaders are automatically converted to 3Delight ".tdl" textures. When using RenderMan shaders, 3Delight's texture converter (tdlmake) can be used to convert the most common images formats to ".tdl" textures.

HDR Images



tdlmake can convert high dynamic range probes (both normal and "twofish" probes) images into environment maps suitable for image based lighting.



3Delight 8.5 and 3Delight for Maya 4.5 released



This release includes support for RSL 2.0 (shader objects and co-shaders) and further ray-tracing optimizations that should give significant performance gains when rendering displacements and motion-blur. 3Delight for Maya includes a new relationship editor to quickly explore and assign shaders and attributes as well as new "edge rounding" features to easily bevel edges on polygonal geometry.