Tip of the Week: Test Resolution

Sometimes when you're working on a scene, you don't need your test frames to be full res. For instance, the final output might be at 1080HD, but to speed things up while you're working on things like lighting and shading, you might only need to preview your renders at quarter res.

You could go into the render globals, do the math, and change the resolution - but it can be a pain to have to always be changing it back and forth. And there's also the risk of forgetting to change it back to full res before you submit a render and leave for the weekend.

Fortunately, there's a built in way of doing it. Just open up Render > Test Resolution, and you can tell Maya to render your previews at a different resolution. Renders that you send from the Render View or if you click "Render Current Frame" will use the test resolution. Batch renders will be unaffected.




It's quick, and it's foolproof.