Maya Render Layers & Passes

#1

Hi all,

I got a rendering question and I think this might be the wrong place to put this thread but I hope someone could help me out anyway.

I’m still a newbie in Maya and I’m abit confuse about the Maya render layers and passes. I’ve seen some tutorials where they create different layers and apply different preset pass(diffuse, AO, reflection etc) to each of the layer and render that out. Other tutorials show you can create one layer and associate all the different passes (diffuse, AO, reflection etc) to that layer and render out that layer. So are they both doing the same thing? What is the correct way to render out all the passes?

chuongy

#2

Both ways work but I prefer to create one pass per layer and create them manually instead of the those pass presets located in the render settings. By associating multiple passes to one render layer you can’t render them individually or preview them. If you need to tune or adjust one render pass, this can make things tough. I also never bother with contribution maps. Some people have other methods that work for them but this is what I find to be the easiest of most straightforward.

#3

Thanks for the tip LJ.

I definitely see the benefit of using layers as separate passes if I need to make adjustment individually. So if I have a scene with 3 objects and want to render out diffuse, AO, reflection and specular for each object then I would need 12 layers all up?

#4

Possibly, it all depends on how much you want to break it down.

You can do you all your specular and reflection together then use a RGB matte pass to seperate each object (one red, one blue, one green) to get a proper matte that you can use to isolate each object for comp.

Again, depending on your scene, you might be able to get away with AO for everything.

#5

Also, render time is a consideration. Theoretically, breaking up one layer into multiple passes is faster than multiple layers with a single pass each. Also, rendering in multiple passes instead of layers allows you to make multi-pass EXRs in-render, which is decidedly useful.

#6

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