What's New in Rendering

Color Management

The new color management system in Maya makes it easy to set up a linear workflow for realistic lighting and rendering, with a good balance between highlights and shadows. Textures and other image inputs are automatically converted from their color spaces to a linear rendering space. You can define rules to automatically assign color spaces on node creation, based on the file extension or your file naming conventions. A view transform is applied to convert images in the viewport, Render View, and UV Editor for display, and you can optionally apply an output transform when rendering.

The new color management system is based on Autodesk Color Management (also known as SynColor, or the color management component of Synergy). It is a shared technology component that is integrated into several Autodesk applications. This allows for consistent processing, interpretation, and communication of colors throughout a mixed pipeline. It also supports OpenColorIO, allowing for compatibility of colors with many other products.

In particular, color management is now enabled by default for all new scenes.

New Viewport 2.0 features

In Maya 2016, Viewport 2.0 supports the following new features:

See the following topics for more information regarding Viewport 2.0 features:

mental ray version 3.13

mental ray for Maya now uses mental ray version 3.13.

New mental ray Render Settings are now available by default with simplified controls.

For backwards compatibility, you can revert back to the Maya 2015 mental ray Render Settings. Enable Use Legacy Render Settings and Show Maya Legacy Passes in the Rendering category of the Preferences window and restart Maya.

To see legacy mental ray passes with the new Render Settings, enable Show Maya Legacy Passes in the Rendering category of the Preferences window. The Passes tab automatically appears and you do not need to restart Maya.

Visit the Nvidia mental ray blog http://blog.mentalray.com for more information.

Other new mental ray features include:

File Textures

  • File textures now have a setting for their input Color Space.

    When color management is enabled, the color values are automatically converted from the input space to the working space for rendering with mental ray and Viewport 2.0, and are then converted to the viewing space for display.

  • The Exposure slider in the Color Balance attribute group adjusts the brightness of the image. The modified colors are used for rendering, as well as for display in Viewport 2.0.
  • The High Dynamic Range Image Preview Options attribute group has been removed.

Render View updates

Color Picking

When using the eyedropper tool to pick colors in Viewport 2.0 or the Render View when color management is enabled, the resulting color values are from the working color space instead of the display color space.

EXR format

You can render to an EXR file from the Maya Hardware 2.0 renderer via batch render or via the Render View, with support for RGBA channels in 16-bit half or 32-bit full float data, and with support for common compression formats. Select your image format, compression method, and data type via the Render Settings window.

You can also save your rendered image in OpenEXR format via File > Save Image in the Render View menu.

Occlusion cast and receive controls

When performing texture baking of ambient occlusion using mental ray for Maya, you can control whether an object casts or receives ambient occlusion by toggling the Occlusion Cast and Occlusion Receive attributes in the object's Attribute Editor.

Batch render to Quicktime

You can now batch render to the Quicktime Movie (.mov) format on the Windows and Linux platforms.