Wireframe Render in Autodesk Maya

A wireframe is a method of rendering a 3D object. It is a visual presentation of a three dimensional or physical object used in 3D computer graphics. It is created by specifying each edge of the physical object where two mathematically continuous smooth surfaces meet, or by connecting an object’s constituent vertices using straight lines or curves.

Using a wire frame model allows visualisation of the underlying design structure of a 3D model. so now I am going to show you how to render wireframe in Maya 2009. Mostly there are several techniques to wireframe rendering in Maya but I will tell you 4 methods that I like.

1 Method: Playblast Rendering

Playblast is a method of capturing unrendered frames on viewport to form an animation.When we create a playblast, Maya goes through and takes a screenshot of each frame and combines them all together to form an animation. So moving on to my cool technique which I used for wireframe renderings.

Note – Playblast captures frames according to viewports resolution. So if your screen maximum resolution is 1024 by 768 then forget about getting HD renders. The rule of thumb here is that, the more the screen resolution the bigger the render you get. So to make HD renders (720p or larger) push your graphic cards screen resolution to the maximum.

PHASE 1

Step 1

First, select your model and assign a lambert shader to it. Then go to the attribute editor (ctrl+a) and make the colour to white and set the white colour value to 1.5 to give it a higher saturation.

Step 2

Now go to the panel menu and under Shading check wireframe on shaded.

Step 3

Now select the object and go to Display>Wireframe Colour and set the colour to

H=137.51

S=0.000

V=0.344

You can also set your own desired colour if you like but I choose dark grey because I am going to composite it with the Ambient Occlusion pass of the model.

Step 4

Now go to windows>playblast options and set the Time Range to Start/End or, Timeslider, whichever you want according to your need.Now under Viewer options select Image Viewer.

Step 5

Go to Display Size and select Custom and type in the resolution you want, in my case 1280 by 720. Also, set the Scale to 1 and Frame Padding to 3. Now select Save to File option and select your desired location and hit playblast.

Here one thing to note that before making any playblast hit ctrl+spacebar to maximise the viewport area, so that it gets enough resolution to render HD ( 1280 by 720). In my case screen resolution is 1440 by 900px.

NOTE- Image format (i.e- Tga, Tiff,Png etc) depends on the settings of Render Settings Window.

PHASE 2

Step 1

PHASE 3

You can also download the PDF from here…

2 Method: Contour Rendering

Step 1

Assign a shader to your polygon object. It doesn’t matter Lambert, Blinn, or Phong it’s all up to you.

Step 2

Now press ctrl+A or, go to the Attribute Editor of the shader. Now go to the shading group(SG) of the particular shader. From there expand the Mental Ray section of the shader. Now come to the contour section and enable it.

Step 3

Now in the Contour section select the colour you want, in my case I choose white colour. Here let the Alpha and Contour Width ( Absolute Width) value to its default.But set the Width Amount to 0.4 (Which adjusts the thickness of the mesh).

Step 4

Now go to Render Settings Window and enable Mental Ray (if mental ray doesn’t show up in the Render Settings Window then go to windows>setting/preferences>plug-in manager and enable mayatomr.mll and set it to Loaded and Autoload so that whenever you start Maya it auto loads Mental Ray plug-in).

Step 5

Now go to the Features Tab and expand the Contour section. From there set the Enable Contour Rendering,( you can also enable the Hide Source check box this will make your object hidden, rendering only the wire frame which you can then composite in any compositing software) and set the Over sample value to 5, Filter Type to Gaussian Filter and Filter Support to value 2.

Step 6

Now come to Draw By Property Difference section below the Contour section and enable Around All Poly Faces checkbox, which will enable contour to be drawn to every single face.

3 Method: Toonshader Rendering

Step 1

First of all, select your object and assign a Toon Shader Outline to it.

Step 2

Now press ctrl+A or, go to the Attribute Editor of the shader. Now In the pfx toon shape expand the Profilelines and Borderlines tab and turn all of their values to 0.

Step 3

Now for wireframe rendering turn the Crease Line option on.

Step 4

In the crease line tab, turn the Hard Crease only to off and Crease angle Min/Max Value to 0.

Step 5

In the crease, line tab adjusts the Crease Line Width depending on how thick you want your wires to be.

Step 6

Now render the scene using Maya Software Renderer. Here note that Toon Shader Outline doesn’t support Mental Ray or, Maya Hardware Renderer.

4 Method: Hardware Render Buffer

Step 1

First, go to the window > rendering editors > hardware render buffer, this will open a window.

Step 2

From this window go to render>attributes. A new tab will open named defaultHardwareRenderGlobals. Now go to image output files and from this choose the resolution you want. If you also want alpha to be there then select Hardware Alpha under Alpha Source.

Step 3

Now go to render modes>draw style and choose wireframe.

Step 4

Now under render modes check line smoothing which smoothes out the wireframe edges. Also, check the full image resolution check box.

Step 5

Now go to background colour under display options tab and choose the background colour you want.

Step 6

Go to top menu bar and choose display>polygons and select backface culling , which will force back face wires not to render.

Step 7

Now select the model and go to display>wireframe colour and choose the colour you want. And you are done.

NOTE- The difference between vector rendering and hardware render buffer rendering is that hardware renders buffer gives smooth wireframes meaning if we were to apply a smooth(modifier) to models it updates itself but vector rendering gives hard edge results.

Here note that vector rendering is supported only by Maya 32bit versions. Vector Renderer plugin doesn’t ship with 64bit versions of Maya(2009) till now.

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