Rendering Particles
 

Hi Everyone!
I'm a newbie, and haven't really been using Maya long. (still flipping through my manual to find simple things)

BUT
I have a question.
I read that you'd have to render a scene without any particles first, then use a composite method to add the particles later. I'm using mental ray to render the "ball" and the water particles dont show up. I used Hardware render mode to render the particles, but the quality is not nearly as good as the mental ray. I noticed an option for the particles called "mental ray" in the attributes of the particles and under "flags" default selected was "Derive from Maya". Deselecting this allows the other options to be edited like "visible" etc. Will this allow the particles to be rendered in mental ray batch renders?

Thanks for the speedy response!

Tim

I dont think so.

I think the quality of the hardware render varies on your graphics card (I might be wrong).

You should be compostiting your hardware rendered particles toghther with your scene using, say photoshop or after effects.

What are you trying to do? As you might ber able to get away with software rendered particles for water, which will render in mental ray.

PLEASE
 

I would love to see it all in one shot.
What is the method for software renderable particles?
I went through the steps (as shown in a "Learning Maya" book)
and they said to use hardware then composite, and going through the step for adding particles, i never saw an option for "render with software"...

Its simply a "Wet Sponge Ball" that bounces towards a camera. The lighting is fairly basic, and there arent many particles coming off of the ball. I'll post a frame.

Thanks
Tim

Here's a frame