Maya Hardware and software renderer

[kevinseven]

after using maya for like a year now, im still clueless abt the functions of maya's Hardware and software renderer

Before Mental Ray was added, those two options were the only game in town for a Maya user. In fact, back in the day, there was no ability to render particles with a software renderer and it all had to be run through the hardware buffer and composited after the fact.

Also, for several years, Mental Ray was unable to render Paint Effects, maya fur, etc.

Eventually the hardware buffer turned into a hardware renderer which if I recall the sales pitches at the time, Alias was thinking people doing spinning logos and on-air graphics would use it in near real time for that type of work.

These days you're most likely to find people saying that Mental Ray is their primary choice (unless they've bought Renderman or some other third party option). But don't count those other options out. With a single seat of Maya you are free to render with the software renderer on 999 other machines. Mental Ray at beast gives you a license for only five render nodes or eight satellites.

Also, on the last two projects I've done, I've had a need to use the software renderer for a particular pass (luma depth or something similar) because in rare cases Mental Ray was too slow...even in scanline mode.

[jakobweiq]

so its to say

Hardware renderer - for texture maps
Software renderer - for efx... particles...etc

m i rite?

[kevinseven]

so its to say

Hardware renderer - for texture maps
Software renderer - for efx... particles...etc

m i rite?

Hmm...maybe it's not such a simple question to answer. Each render option offers different good and bad points. But basically speaking, if you are using 2009 or 2010 then all you would ever need would be Mental Ray.The other renderers are old options and as far as I know, no longer receiving and attention from the Maya developers. That's not to say that they don't have their uses still.

It might be better to approach it from the perspective of what those two options don't do:

Hardware renderer - no raytracing
Software renderer - no global illumination or final gather

Hope that helps.

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