About the Maya Hardware Renderer

Maya Software rendering can take a long time. If you want to make a preview of your animation without having to software render it, you can hardware render it instead. The quality of the result will be somewhere between a Playblast and a software render, depending on the features and processing power of your graphics card. The most powerful cards can provide results similar to software rendering, but many cards lack the capacity to display reflections, bump maps, and shadows.

To render an image using the Maya Hardware renderer:

1.	Open or create a scene to render.
2.	Open the Render Settings window, and set Render Using to Maya Hardware (Figure 16.87). Figure 16.87. The Render Using drop-down menu allows you to switch to any of Maya's four renderers.
3.	Set the Common settings by following the steps in the "To change the Common settings" task earlier in this chapter.
4.	On the Maya Hardware tab, click the triangle next to Quality to expand the options.
5.	From the Presets drop-down menu, choose Preview Quality (Figure 16.88). Figure 16.88. The Preview Quality preset provides the fastest possible render. This preset automatically sets several of the options and is a good choice for quick render tests. For high-quality renders, choose Production Quality.
6.	Choose Render > Batch Render. The scene is rendered. You can view its progress in the Command Feedback line.