What's New in Rendering and Shading

Arnold for Maya renderer now available with Maya 2017

A default install of Maya 2017 now includes Arnold for Maya. For a list of new features, see Arnold for Maya new features.

New Render Setup features

Hierarchical collections are now supported in the Render setup system, improving performance and allowing for better organization and control. It is now easier to recognize the objects and nodes that have overrides applied, and more advanced workflows are now made possible.

Lights are added to render layers by default, and it is no longer necessary to drag and drop the lights collection to add them to a layer.

Create AOV overrides to enable or disable different AOVs on each render layer, or export your AOVs and import them into another scene.

Batch render scene files with either render setup or legacy render layers without having to switch the Preferred Render Setup System in your Maya preferences.

Note:

Maya's Render Setup system was introduced in Maya 2016 Extension 2. It replaces the legacy render layer system, and simplifies the management of complex scenes. It brings a modern approach to adding shot-based overrides to scenes, and you can then easily generate templates for the setup of a shot and propagate these setups from one shot to another. See What's New in Rendering and Shading in Maya 2016 Extension 2 for more information.

Render a sequence of frames interactively

When rendering an animation, you can render a sequence of frames without the need to batch render. For convenience, you can also add these images to the Render View for preview.

New Viewport 2.0 features

New Hair material geometry in the Hypershade Material Viewer

You can now render your hair shader using the hair swatch geometry in the Material Viewer in the Hypershade.

OCIO look support for color management

If you are using an OpenColorIO configuration file that defines a view that includes a look transform, the look transform is now applied automatically when using the OCIO view as the View Transform.

New ShaderFX hair shader

A new Hair Surface Shader node has been added to ShaderFX that allows you to create hair materials for your game.

Texture files are provided in the /presets/Assets/Textures folder of the Maya install that you can connect to the Opacity Map and Breakup Map attributes of the ShaderFX Attribute Editor.

mental ray no longer provided with Maya

In Maya 2017, mental ray is no longer provided with Maya. To render scenes that contain mental ray nodes, download the mayatomr plug-in from the NVIDIA web site.