MayaMan Help Contents

# Render/Display Layers

MayaMan provides support for Maya's Render and Display Layer mechanism for visibility control and provides a way to render all objects in a layer as RiMatte objects.

#### Notes For MayaMan 1.2.52 & Later

As of mayaman 1.2.52 the differences in interpretation of display/render layers between mayaman's preview and render mode has been eliminated as it causes confusion rather than acting as convenience.

In Maya 6.5 and earlier, all objects in all renderable layers will be rendered as beauty objects, objects in nonrenderable layers may be rendered as RiMatte according to the use of the MayaManMatte flag outlined below.

In Maya 7.0 and later, all objects in the current render layer are rendered as beauty objects regardless of layer renderablity. Objects in other renderable layers are rendered as matte objects if the MayaManMatte flag is turned on, otherwise the object is discarded.

Because of the differences between maya 6.5 and 7.0, extra pass callback scripts that manipulate layers renderability and MayaManMatte flags may need to be reviewed, in partcular, 6.5 scripts will typically iterate the render layers and make one at a time renderable... for 7.0 scripts the current render layer attribute of the renderLayerManager should be manipulated.

Also note, when a maya 6.5 scene is loaded into maya 7.0 it will replicate the layer associations of some objects strangely (via a defaultRenderLayerV6 layer), this is not always honoured correctly by mayaman and scene review may be required.

##### Batch Mode Layer Selection For Maya 7.0 & Later

In addtion to the '-layer' command line argument (that turns on/off the renderable attribute of a renderLayer) there is a new '-dolayer' command line argument that which chose which layer will actually be processed on the invokation of mayamanbatch.

#### Display Layers

MayaMan checks the Maya's Drawing Overrides to see if a display layer has manipulated visibility. If Enable Overrides is enabled on the object and the controlling layer has a MayaManMatte attribute added (main menu, Add Layer Attributes) and it is turned on then the layer will be treated as if the objects in it are RiMatte... this will happen regardless of other visiblity settings.

#### Render Layers

All the same notes regarding Matte flags for Display Layers also applies to Render Layers.

#### MayaManMatte

This flag controls how unselected layers are handled. If enabled (the default state when present) then the layer will be matted when it's not selected, otherwise the layer will be elided.

If the attribute is not present then the layer will be culled.

To add the attribute to all render/display layers, use the main MayaMan menu's Add Layer Attributes button.

NOTE, the behaviour when you have the attribute in it's default state is different to when it is absent. This is carefully considered so that the two most common desired states are easy to achieve.

Common case 1: each layer should only contain the objects for that layer, in this case, don't add the attribute and it will do just that.

Common case 2: each layer should be matted by all other layers, in this case, add the attribute to all layers via the main menu entry and leave it at that.

#### Limitations

The Render Pass Options of a Display Layer are ignored, at some stage these values may be used to drive Extra Output Channels.