Rendering Wireframes within Maya

This is a quick tutorial on how to use Maya's Vector Renderer to render out wireframes of all your 3d meshes.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Vector
• Render
• Wireframe
• Maya
• 3D
• Polygons

[110Mahdi110]

1st Thanx for posting

Just as a tip, you can get wireframe & its alpha by Maya Hardware Renderer too.

To see Hardware Renderer go to "Window/Rendering Editors/Hardware Render Buffer". Then from opened player menu choose "Render/Attributes". In settings change "Render Modes/Draw Style" to "Wireframe" & to get its alpha in "Image Output Files/Alpha Source" choose "Hardware Alpha". Now go back to your player window & from Render menu choose "Render Sequence".

Hope you can benefit from this.

[PolyNurb]

110Mahdi110,

Awesome see everyone is learning good stuff in here lol.

[PolyNurb]

ThePearl,

Easy fix I think if its doing what I think it is. Remember only hard edges are picked up by the vector renderer in this instance. Usually when you run the smooth function it sets the smoothing angle to around 180, so you lose all the hard edges, thus no wires render. Easy test, after smoothing harden edges on the entire model and see if the wires show up. If this doesn't work I have some other ideas, let me know.

[PolyNurb]

draxi88,

You can set the render to only render wires facing the camera and cull out all backfacing wires...or have it render right on through and render all of the wires seen right through the model.

[PolyNurb]

Yes you need to harden any edge you wish to show up as a wire edge in the final render. In my example I wanted a wireframe for the entire model so I hardened edges all over the model.

[PolyNurb]

Sebatian,

You wouldn't by chance be using either Maya 2008 or an Intel based Mac would you? This error message is a known glitch for those computers using Maya 2008 and I think Maya 8.5. It has something to do with licensing for like the cloth and the vector renderer....Google it and you'll find all you need to help you fix it.

[LittleKatydid]

Thank you so much for posting this! I was looking all over for a wire frame shader and this has proven to be so much easier. Thank you!

[LittleKatydid]

@Cambrand

I had the same effect. The way I solved it is that if you for instance want a white background with black lines, I made a lambert shader for the objects white and applied it. 

[Siemenix]

Thank for this tuto ! :)

[Ann199040]

Do you know how to delete animating of a object? even though I have delete the keyframe, but it's still moving...

[Cambrand]

This aint working for me for some reason. done it before, but right now, im getting a cartoony look, with wirefram on top of the mesh which has colors similar to the texture colors.. really strange.. using maya 2011 subscription pack. Any ideas?

[HairyPotter2006]

@110Mahdi110 wow , this is much easier. Thanks.

[samm565]

1:05 keep it G please

[Kurtssingh]

Cheers quite useful vid :)

[Mixamo3DAnimation]

Great tutorial!! There isn't very many tutorials on vector rendering. Cheers!

[mtranger]

thanks for the tutorial, but one question. how would you render a sequence using vector? or could you just render the uv's wireframe to do that.?