Differences in Previewing and Rendering

Interactive renderer Maya has a function similar to LightWave's VIPER that's called IPR (Interactive Photorealistic Renderer). Like VIPER, it allows you to have an interactively updated rendering for edits to lights and materials.

Previewing LightWave offers a preview option near the playback controls for getting quick-shaded playback of an animated segment. In Maya this feature is called Playblast and has a similar function.

Rendering In Maya, you simply click the director's clapboard icon to render the current frame. The settings usually assigned in LightWave as camera properties are mostly in the Render Globals window in Maya, where you set the resolution, motion blur, raytracer quality, and other rendering attributes. The camera attributes in Maya contain only field of view, depth of field, and other camera-specific settings. Also, it is possible to have orthogonal cameras in Maya and to render from them. Maya starts a scene with three fixed-direction orthographic cameras , which otherwise function like any other Maya camera and are predefined for the orthographic views: Top, Side, and Front. Rendering is always performed on the active view in Maya ”the view panel with a frame around it.