Creating Visual Effects in Maya

Chapter 10

Preparing, Rendering, and Combining Render Passes

Although it’s possible to render a Maya animation in a single batch rendering pass, it limits your ability to fine-tune the render outside of Maya. As an alternative approach, you can create render layers and render passes and thereby break the Maya scene into multiple image sequences. This gives you the advantage of using a compositing program to recombine the renders. With multiple image sequences, you can adjust the look of each sequence without affecting the 3D scene as a whole. This is a common procedure in the visual effects industry, where it’s necessary to adjust 3D renders to ...