Rendering wires in Maya

Steve Schulze · Jan 2005

Whats the best way to do this? There doesn't appear to be an actual wireframe, which makes things difficult. I've tried using a 1*1 grid texture on a UV layout where all of the polys have been stretched to the same standard size (I forget the name of the tool) which sort of works, but tends to vary the size of the wires in areeas where there are less faces.

I'm sure I'm missing something obvious. Help me find it.

Gmanx · Jan 2005

I saw on the net somewhere, a shading solution which painted edges a different colour (possibly a ramp shader?). Damned if I can find it now....OK, I got it. You'll need to use Mental Ray, and this is for white with black wires. Make a new lambert material, colour it white. Open it's shading group tab, go to Mental Ray/contours, enable it, choose black as colour, ensure the 'absolute width' radio button is checked and select a value of 0.75 to start (this is where you adjust the width of your wire lines). Open up Render Globals/contours menu, enable contour rendering, make sure 'hide source' is unchecked. In Quality, input 'oversample value' of 10 (you'll have to type this - the slider won't go that far). In 'Draw Contours/ by Property difference', check the first two options - Coverage and Primitives. In 'by Sample Contrast', uncheck everything!! Mow just sit back and wait for the render!

Jeff Parrott · Jan 2005

Check on highend3d.com there is a plugin for it. The vector renderer also has a wireframe renderer, but the frames won't line up perfectly if you're doing a blend in a movie. Should be pretty easy to find in the vector render options. If you have trouble let me know and I can post more into it.

Steve Schulze · Jan 2005

Your technique doesn't seem to work GManX. I've gone over the instructions several times and am sure I've done everything the instructions said, but when I go to render the model appears without wires for about half a second and then the whole thing goes black.

EDIT:Ok missed something. It works now, but thats a hideously complicated way to work. It also renders tris rather than quads which isn't terribly useful. I'll have a bit more of a fiddle with it.

I'll see if I can find that MEL on highend3d

SECOND EDIT: How do the majority of you do your wireframe renders for P&P? Are you just using screengrabs or some such?

Asthane · Jan 2005

Personally, I use screengrabs of viewports for pretty much everything I show. They look clean and I know exactly what I'm getting-- especially in Maya, which has to be played with for a while to make it put out quality renders

MoP · Jan 2005

A screengrab from Maya in facet-shaded and "edged faces" wireframe display is how I used to show off Maya models. Works quite well if you make the viewport HUGE, then zoom so the model fills the viewport totally, then scale it down to about half size in Photoshop. Makes it look antialiased

pyromania · Jan 2005

Vector render and the hardware renderer are what I use. Vector render gives you more options on how the wireframe looks, but hardware gives you a more accurate image.

In the render attributs for Hardware Render, go to the render modes section and change Draw Style to wireframe. Then you can change things like wire color and background color.

The vector renderer will render tri's by default. If you want quads you can set all your mesh normals to hard, then in the render options change the edge style outline, and you will get a quad render instead of tri's.

malcolm · Jan 2005

I just do a screenshot of the GL view with wireframes turned on, you can change the colour in the colours menu and if you want antialiasing you can turn on smooth wireframe under the shading pulldown, I don't really suggest it though as it has a few problems. As well if you want to comp your wireframes in a render just render out your shot and then playplast your same shot and use that as your fade to wireframe movie. For Maya 3 there was a wireframe shader which was free at the time and it behaved similar to the one in max which is standard but I think you now how to purchase the wireframe shader from some dude's web site, I found it wasn't exactly what I wanted any ways.

Rendering wires in Maya

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