Design and implementation of the Maya Renderer

Maya is the new 3D software package recently released by Alias I Wavefront for creating state of the art character animation and visual effects. Built on a next generation advanced architecture, Maya delivers high speed interaction and high productivity for its users. In the Fall of 1995, the Rendering Team at Alias/Wavefront started from scratch to design and implement a renderer for the Maya project. This was a very challenging task, requiring the efficient generation of high quality images for a next generation 3D application that was still under development. In addition, we were expected to match or exceed the capabilities of our existing popular rendering products (as well as those from our competitors). In January of 1998, the all new renderer was delivered with Maya 1.0. It includes a comprehensive user interface that is well integrated with the rest of the system, and a batch renderer that is capable of efficiently generating a full spectrum of high quality visual effects. Currently, there are high end computer graphics (CG) productions in progress that are using the Maya Renderer. We concentrate on our batch renderer implementation effort. We describe the philosophy, design decisions, and the tasks we set out to achieve in 1995. We then evaluate the delivered system based on images generated with the renderer.