Maya 2012 render settings [2 questions plus 1 img]

n88tr

1. So I see this drop down menu with a bunch of options.



I usually use Production quality when I render but I wanted to know what all the others do?

2. And I set my AO render colors to white and black but I still see a lot of grain in my renders. i set my samples to 72 and my resolution to 1k square plus 300 resolution but I still see too much noise/grain. Do I just keep cranking my resolution?

Thank you

kodde

Seeing as all of those are presets you should perhaps consider actually reading up on the individual attributes of the render settings. The presets are just differently tweaked attributes. The Maya help is really good to start with.

Concerning the grain I'm not familiar with your render setup. But could it be that you certain of these quality settings are controlled from outside of the render options. For instance inside of a mental ray shader or something similar?

fade1

as kodde mentioned these are just presets to start from. depends what your focus is on....
the grain might come from too low final gather settings. use 1000 for production quality, if you got this turned out. ao is something maya handles as a separate pass. if you have another render layer with ao you can tweak the samples there...hard to judge with no scene info.

overall, maya is a beast. it can do just about everything, but mostly it takes much time and/or experience to get thee desired results....