V-Ray and Maya |
As a built-in rendering plugin for Autodesk® Maya®, V-Ray supports most of the standard geometry primitives as well as some of the basic shaders inside Maya. Note, however, that in difference from V-Ray for 3ds Max, V-Ray for Maya cannot use the standard Maya shaders, materials, lights etc. Instead, their functionality is emulated by V-Ray specific plugins. Therefore, differences in the operation of the standard Maya plugins and their V-Ray equivalents are possible. In addition, the Hypershade graphs need to be mapped to the V-Ray plugin parameters system.
Note that the list below is not exhaustive.
The following geometry types are supported:
All geometry types except Maya Fluids support motion blur.
- Polygonal surfaces; optionally, these can be rendered as subdivision surfaces;
- NURBS surfaces; these are tesselated internally by V-Ray.
- Maya Subdiv surfaces - note that hierarchical edits are only partially supported. V-Ray will call the Maya API to subdivide the original mesh up to the last level that has hierarchical edits. If the required level exceeds 131072 vertices, a lower level will be chosen that has less than 131072 vertices. In the process some of the hierarchical edits may be lost. Creases are not supported.
- Particles and nParticles - the supported particle render types are :
V-Ray will also recognize the per-particle radius and diffuse color. Per-particle sprites are not supported.
- Multipoint
- Multistreak
- Points
- Spheres
- Sprites
- Streak
- Instancer (Replacement)
- Maya hair
- Maya Paint effects are partially supported
- Maya Fluids are partially supported
- V-Ray proxy
- V-Ray fur
The Maya conversion utilities can be used to render some of the other Maya geometry types. For example, paint effects can be converted to polygons and then rendered with V-Ray.
The following material types are supported:
For these materials, the supported parameters are:
1 - both Layered Shaders and Layered Texture modes are treated
as Layered Texture (see the Maya reference for more info on those two
modes).
The following texture types are supported:
The following texture types are partially supported (they will be mapped to the same V-Ray noise generator):
The following Maya utilities are supported:
Image plane
The following bitmap file types are supported:
- JPG
- PNG
- TGA
- BMP
- HDR
- EXR
- SGI
- PIC
- TIFF
The following light types are supported:
- Directional light;
- Point light;
- Spot light;
- Rectangle light.
The VRaySun and VRaySky are special features which are provided by the V-Ray renderer. Developed to work together, the VRaySun and VRaySky reproduce the real-life Sun and Sky environment of the Earth. Both are coded so that they change their appearance depending on the direction of the VRaySun.
The V-Ray Sun and Sky are based largely on the SIGGRAPH'99 paper "A Practical Analytic Model for Daylight" by A. J. Preetham, Peter Shirley, Brian Smits.
In the VRaySky tab of V-Ray Render Settings window there are buttons to create the two nodes.
The following Maya camera settings are supported:
- Environment (background) color - this also determines the GI (skylight) color for GI calculations;
- Angle of view (Field of view).
More V-Ray specific options are available in the Camera tab of V-Ray Render Settings window with separate tabs for DOF and Motion Blur.
Environment colors can be overriden and there is an option to easily assign a 2d texture as an environment texture. A V-Ray environment placement node is created with several mapping types available: angular, cubic, spherical, mirror ball.
The animation settings are in the V-Ray Render Settings window under Image File Output.
Thus a sequence of frames is rendered the same way, only the animation checkbox should be checked and the corresponding start and end frames should be set.