Quick Tip: How to Enhance Render Quality in Maya

Hey Guys! Today I will share a small Quick Tip – "How to Enhance Render Quality in Maya". When we simply render a scene in Maya, it renders using the default settings. This may be good for a quick preview, but certainly not for production level work. But after tweaking a couple of options, you can get a very sharp, clear and high quality output. Although it comes at the price of increased rendering time, the overall final output will be much better than before. So let’s see how we can enhance the overall rendering quality in only a few steps.

Step 1

Let’s discuss the shadow and anti alias quality first. I am using a very simple scene with some lights and textures, just for demonstration purposes. Now simply render the scene.

You can see the rendered image looks jittered and jagged around the edges. The shadow also looks jagged.

Now we will tweak several parameters to get better quality. Right now the ‘Quality’ is set to ‘Preview quality’. So open its roll-out options and choose ‘Production quality’.

Open the ‘Edge anti-aliasing’ roll-out options and choose ‘Highest quality’. Actually Anti-aliasing makes the pixels of the rendered image much clearer.

And now render the scene once again. You will notice the rendering is taking a bit more time, because this time the software is rendering the image with a higher number of samples and anti-aliasing quality. You can compare the previously rendered image with the new one (shown below) and you will find the new rendered image less jagged.

Step 2

We can make the rendered image much better by using the ‘Multi- pixel Filtering’ option. So, go the ‘Multi- pixel Filtering’ option and increase the Pixel filter width size to 3. This is the maximum size.

Now render the scene and this time you will get a much clearer and sharper rendered image.

Step 3

So we saw how to increase the rendering quality using the Maya Software rendering engine. Now we will see how to do the same thing in Mental Ray. For this, we will first change the render engine from the ‘Software Render’ to the Mental Ray renderer.

Now render the scene.

Step 4

Now turn On the Final Gathering option for better quality.

Step 5

Now render the scene. The rendered image looks bright and fine, but there are also some jittering and anti-alias problems. This is because we have not set the rendering quality to the highest quality.

Step 6

Now go to the Quality tab inside the Render Settings window.

Step 7

Change the Maximum Sample Level from 0 to 2 or more. When you increase the samples, it means you are increasing the quality to get a non-jittered and sharp rendered image and hence the rendering time will also increase.

Step 8

Now hit the Render button to render the scene. It takes some time to render the scene, but the final result is quite clear and sharp.

Step 9

Now see the difference between the previously rendered image and the newly rendered one. You will find the newly rendered image less jagged and much better looking.

Step 10

Now finally increase the Filter Size to 4 and set the Filter type to Mitchell.

Step 11

And hit the Render button to see the final result. This time the rendered image is very clear, sharp and highly anti-aliased. So these are the simple steps by which you can enhance the final quality of your rendered images.

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