Smoothing With The Approximation Editor (Maya / Mental Ray)

For my final Animation Mentor assignment I knew I wanted a few shots that were really close to the character’s eyes. Unfortunately even with the character on the highest quality the eyes still looked like this:

No Smoothing

So why not just press the smooth button in Maya a few times? Well, you can do that but it will really slow down render times. This is where Mental Ray’s Approximation editor comes in handy!

1) Make sure Mental Ray is loaded (Window -> Settings/Preferences -> Plugin Manager -> Mayatomr.mll)
2) Select your mesh and go to Window -> Rendering Editors -> mental ray -> Approximation Editor
3) Under the section “Subdivisions (Polygon and Subd. Surfaces)” click the “Create” button.

That’s it! And with mimimal added rendering time (for this frame it added about a second) the frame now looks like this:

Smooth

Just to confirm, this will only work if you’re rendering in Mental Ray. Hope that’s useful, happy smoothing!

Simon