Rendering Curve Flow
 

I created a curve, applied a curve flow to it and try to render and I get the following message:

Warning: Hardware rendering selected for RiverFlow_particleSHape. Skipped.

How do I set this so my river is rendered in the scene?

Chris, Baltimore.

You need to render it using the hardware render buffer and composite it in with a program that will do that (like after effects or shake). If you look at the render type drop-down list in your ParticleShape attributes under Render Attributes you can see that "cloud", "tube" and "blobby" both have (s/w) written after them. This means that they will be software rendered. All other particle types must be rendered using the hardware render buffer.

Hope this helped

So, I would need a second program to render it with the motion? I've rendered "ocean" effects without needing a second program.

I'll give your tips a try. Maybe I'm just not understanding (probably)

Chris

sorry:). Guess I wasn't very clear.

you can render the particles within Maya's hardware render buffer (just search for that in the docs, they're clear once you know where to look) but when you render with that you get only the particles.

Here's a step-by-step type thing:

1) set up your scene

2) render everything but the particles with maya s/w or mental ray

3) render your particles using the hardware render buffer (make sure you render into a format that supports alpha, like TARGA

4) composite the particles onto the scene in a compositing program like shake or AE using the alpha layer


So you don't need another program to render the particles, but to composite them into the rest of your scene.