Rendering in Layers in Maya - Tutorials Directory

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Rendering in Layers in Maya

By: Bogdan Amidzic

Imagine this -- you are doing a shot for a film, for example, a cyber cityscape. And you use many lights, glows, fog, crafts … and of course, you turn on some form of GI or ambient occlusion. And when you press render it takes hours to render, but it...

Added: 16 July 2008 Views: 7731

Path : Computers

3D Graphics

Maya

Keywords: computers maya layers graphics render

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In hypershade, you can see that new surface shader was created. In color input it has mlb_amb_occlusion1. That is the mental ray occlusion sampler. Set samples to 32. The more samples you set, the less noise it will have and the longer time it will take to render.

If you render that layer, you can see the result. In compositing, I will multiply this layer with color to make details more visible.

Our scene still looks normal.

Select all objects in the scene, except lights and create new layer. Select all objects except the tiny glows and assign one surface shader to it. That material will be assigned to those objects only in that layer.

Set all attributes to black. When matte opacity is black (0) it will not create alpha and it'll block out all other objects and have no color.

If you render that glow layer, the colors shall be blocked in all other objects and only those tiny lights will have alpha, so it could be put over all other layers in compositing.

In options, check Render All Layers if you want to render all layers together. You can also set blending modes for each layer to get preview.

Create another layer, and assign all objects to it. Assign a surface shader to all objects.

In Out Color for surface shader, create a Ramp texture, as projection. This will create a placement node for texture.

Scale the placement node to fit all geometry in the scene.

Change colors in ramp from white to black.

When rendered, that layer looks like this. We will use it for the fog (Y depth).

The last thing you need to do is to render all layers or do a batch render of the sequence if you have it.
For compositing I will use Shake. In Shake, I created four fileIn nodes with render layers.

If you like hypershade, you will love Shake. So use Imult node to multiply color with the ambient occlusion layer. This will darken the holes and details.

Then with over node put glows on top of IMult layer.

This is a little more complicated, I used IMult to change the density of fog, with Reorder, I copied the R channel of image to Alpha channel, since Color node (plain color) is using it for a mask.

The Color node is orange, but here the thumbnail is black. Then that orange goes on top of over1 node.

Here I added blurred glows as the height drops. Those glows on the streets are blurred.

Now if you want to change the color of the fog, just change the color of color1 node. You can tweak everything instantly.
You can do all that in Photoshop, but you can do that only on single images. Shake is much better for these kinds of jobs, and for a Maya user, it takes only a few hours to get into Shake.
That will be all for now.