Differences in Previewing and Rendering

Interactive renderer: Maya has a function similar to LightWave's VIPER that's called Interactive Photorealistic Renderer (IPR). Like VIPER, it enables you to have 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: Maya offers four different renderers:

• Maya Software The software renderer that has the most compatibility with all of Maya's features.

• Maya Hardware An OpenGL-shaded mode for very fast output. Maya expects most of its particle systems to be rendered with the Hardware Rendering mode.

• Maya Vector A vector renderer to create outlined, cartoon-like images that are ideal for Flash-oriented graphics on web sites or frame-by-frame cel-style cartoons.

• Mental Ray A modern raytrace renderer with many advanced options.

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 Maya's Render Global Settings window, where you set the resolution, motion blur, raytracer quality, and other rendering attributes. Renderer-specific attributes are in the second tab of the Render Global Settings window. Camera attributes in Maya contain only field of view, depth of field, and other camera-specific settings. Also, in Maya, you can have orthographic cameras and 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.