Letterbox effect
 

I'm trying to find a way to do a letterbox effect (the black bars you see on the top and bottom of some films) in Maya. I know it can be done in post-processing, but I had heard you could do it in Maya. Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance!

hehe I just happend to read about it two minutes ago, I'll try to explain.

Ah, now I understand... Here it goes... (example)

Render Globals;
--> Resolution --> Preset = 640x480
--> Render Options = uncheck "ignore film gate"

Camera attribute editor;
--> Film Back --> Film Gate = 70mm
--> Display Options = check resolution gate and film gate

And there you go!

Another thing; in Camera attribute editor -->
Film Back --> Film Fit = Horizontal or Overscan to get the film gate inside your resolution gate.

OR!
create two black panes, position them to get your "letterbox" effect and parent em to the camera :) not as technical as undseths way but still :)

You guys are the best. I had read another tutorial on how to do this and it made no sense and didn't work at all. Both of these worked perfectly. Thanks so much!

Is it just me, or does this seem to not work with Mental Ray 1.5.1? For some reason when I render with MR it doesn't work at all, and in fact it refuses to render from the Camera1. Anyone else run into this?

Edit: What I think is going on is that when I go to the Mental Ray Globals > Quality > Render Quality and change that to "mentalrayOptions1" (so I can turn on things like Final Gathering and GI) it doesn't remember to NOT ignore the film gate. So although I can see the resolution and film gates, it's ignoring the film gate and not adding the black bars. So, how to get MR to ignore the film gate is what I think I need, but how to do that I don't know. I don't see a way to get MR to recognize the Render Options from the Maya Render Globals.