Saturday, July 19, 2008
Tip of the Week:
Default Render Globals - Part 2
Did you know that you can keyframe render settings? Just select the defaultRenderGlobals node and right click on the various attributes in the channel editor to key them the same way you would any other Maya attribute.
Keying "Blur Length" is a great way to control motion blur for various effects, such as a spaceship jumping to light speed or making a fight scene more dramatic. You could also key "By Extension" if you wanted to render a particular region by 1 frame steps and another by fractional steps in order to playback in slow motion. (Or better yet, combine these two tricks and time-remap in post.)
It's also sometimes convenient to keyframe your quality settings if you have different regions of an animation with different needs, or to keep Maya from crashing on particularly troublesome frames when you're short on RAM. For this, you can't use defaultRenderGlobals. You have to select a related node called defaultRenderQuality. It's attributes aren't keyable by default, but you can make them keyable in the Channel Control Window.
Those are just a few practical uses in production. Feel free to chime in if you come up with any others that might be interesting.
Other useful rendering nodes worth experimenting with include:
defaultHardwareRenderGlobals
hardwareRenderGlobals
miDefaultOptions
miDefaultFramebuffer
mentalrayGlobals
strokeGlobals
defaultResolution
Play around, and see what kinds of tricks you can come up with.
Labels: Maya, Rendering, Tip of the Week
