What you'll learn

When rendering a scene for production, it's important for the compositing artist who receives your renders to have as much control as possible for making adjustments in post. Handing off a flat beauty pass just isn't an option. It's situations like these that multi-pass rendering was designed for. This Maya tutorial will introduce you to the concept of multi-pass rendering and walk you through the tools and techniques you'll need to be familiar with. We'll start by learning about render layers and layer overrides. Next, we'll dive into the render pass system and learn about pass organization as well as how we can begin to use passes together with contribution maps. From here, we'll begin to look into some advanced features of render passes like frame buffers. We'll learn how to customize the contribution to them and even create our own. After going through this Maya training, you'll have learned how to take control over your final renders and how they get broken apart for compositing. Software required: Maya 2015.