Need help rendering for portfolio with maya 8!

Shufly

Okay, Im really having trouble getting my stuff to look really nice and presentable with maya 8 right now, and there seems like theres no "easy" way to get a good Wire and Clay render for models as well.

Basically what Im lookin for help with right now is a "quick" way to render models (I got quite a few too do) in a "portfolio friendly" manner.

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Actually Im not even sure myself at the moment what exactly I need to do to get the most out of maya at the moment in terms of rendering in order to make my models really shine for presentation, other than the fact that I probably need some form of wireframe on shaded method and Clay rendering. I guess Im also confused on the methods of achieving those rendering techniques as well.

Please forgive me if this post is really confusing, Im lacking sleep right now, and under a bit of stress.

Thanks in advanced.

Brice Vandemoortele

If the models are built for realtime I use screenshots of the viewport most of the time, sometime using a custom cgfx shader. You can enable the 'wireframe on shaded' option and tweak it in photoshop. A nice color scheme and a nice font (in a normal size) will do the trick most of the time

fogmann

What Brice said: viewport screengrab should be sufficient to show off your realtime models, and if you have normal maps and aren't using realtime shaders, make sure to turn on High Quality rendering. You can also turn on antialiasing for wireframe under Shading > Smooth Wireframe, although the wire will appear thicker so figure out if that is what you want.

If you really want to render with some occlusion or GI or fancy shaders, you can turn on contours in mental ray render settings, and check Around Silhouette and Around all poly faces, and optionally set the filter type to triangle or Gaussian and increase over-sampling for smoother results. Then in your material shading group attr editor, you also need to turn on Enable Contour Rendering under mental ray tab. Do this for all different materials assigned to objects that you want to show wireframes for. You can adjust the width and set color for the contours, and alternatively, if you want something fancier, you can use custom contour shader, such as depth fade or curvature - those two could work well. To do that, go to Hypershade, switch to Create mental ray nodes, and then under Contour Shader pick one, create it, then mmb drag it to slot for Contour Shader in Custom Shaders tab under the shading group of your material. Then, you can render wireframe on top of fully shaded model, with shadows and reflections or whatever you want to have rendered.