Maya particle rendering

Particles in Maya are divided into two categories: software particles (SoftwareParticles) and hardware particles (HardwareParticles) according to the choice of the renderer. Except for BlobbySurface, Cloud, Tube, which are three software rendering types of particles, Maya renders most particle effects usually using hardware rendering. The hardware rendering mentioned here does not refer to the HarderWare rendering method in the rendering window RenderView, but the Hardware Render Buffer (hardware rendering buffer) - in addition to particle effects, it is also often used to render model wireframes. Because the picture obtained by using HardwareRender through RenderView or BatchRender is not "what you see is what you get", it is still converted by the functions inside the Maya software - although the rendering quality of the graphics will be better than that of the HardwareRenderBuffer screenshot, but it will also lose Support for some instant effects. RenderBuffer obtains graphics by directly taking screenshots, so the quality of the effect depends on the current graphics processing performance of the graphics card, which is the real hardware real-time rendering. HardwareRenderer will be greatly improved with the enhancement of the performance of next-generation graphics cards.

Software rendering includes MayaSoftware (SW) and MentalRay (MR) rendering methods (MayaVector vector renderer does not support particle rendering). MayaSoftware only supports the rendering of three types of particles: "drop surface, cloud, and tube", and supports particle lighting linking (LightLinking) and ray tracing shadowing.

So let's take a look at how to render the particle light effect we mentioned in the previous article.

First take a look at the actual particle effects in the scene:

and the effect of normal rendering:

As you can see, Maya SoftWare renders nothing, and the hardware renders it , but the result is still not what we want. After some research we found that only the last three attributes in the particle rendering type cloud, sprite and drop surface (s/w) can be rendered by Maya SW. This is because, in the old version of Maya's particle system, properties such as color and transparency of particles are controlled by expressions, and the acquisition of properties such as color is done by hardware, so only hardware can render. But the latter three rendering types can be rendered by SW because they have material nodes and can control the properties of the material.

Next is the problem of rendering particles in HardWare. In fact, since the final particle effect is composed of a specially copied instance of a Particle, the hardware does not capture the attributes of other particles, so it cannot be rendered. From here, the Particle Disk Cache tool under Dynamics -> Settlement Period is available.

Since the particle system is calculated in real-time by East-West, the particles are recalculated every time we replay. So is there a way to store the entire process of particles? We can create a particle cache and select all particles in the following properties. In this way, we can adjust the timeline at will, and freely watch the forward and reverse of the particles. .

Next is rendering, we can open the hardware rendering buffer under the rendering editor:

In the hardware render buffer we can see that all particles are completely rendered:

The above is the solution of Maya's rendering in the particle system, and then the final composition of the sprite tree will be blogged.