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.
In Maya 2016, Viewport 2.0 supports the following new features:
See Run Viewport 2.0 in Core Profile mode and What's New in Shading for more information.
See Add hardware fog to Viewport 2.0 and View the depth of field effect in Viewport 2.0.
Gamma is no longer available in the Viewport 2.0 options.
See the following topics for more information regarding Viewport 2.0 features:
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:
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.
When color management is enabled, you can control the view transform that converts colors from the working color space for display. This is useful, for example, if you want to quickly check the raw color values. Click the icon to toggle the view transform off temporarily, and back on again. Use the drop-down list to select a different view transform.
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.
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.
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.
You can now batch render to the Quicktime Movie (.mov) format on the Windows and Linux platforms.