What bit-depth does Maya use for rendering?

[plumbershelper]

I have always assumed that Maya's renderer calculates illumination etc. at 8bits, and that this is the cause of certain banding artifacts you sometimes see (especially in the diffuse component).

I know Renderman gives you the option of rendering at various bitdepths, 8bit and 16bit being the most common, but what does Maya use?

Mitch

[deke-kincaid]

Well Maya has to atleast calculate at 16 bits/channel and then quantize down since there is a couple 16 bit file formats that you can render to(iff16, tif16, sgi16 and rla16). We asked exactly what it was on the maya listserve and the a/w engineers would only say that it does render at above 16bpc. Stuff like fur is only done at 8 bit and the renderer will add a little noise to them if you using a 16 bit file format.

You will get banding artifacts in any renderer even if it does quantize down from a higher bit depth. Especially where the image has a dramatic change from dark to light or if you are using pure white or black values(0 or 1). Just try not using pure 1.0 values of a color to try to prevent this or simply render at 16 bit in the first place. The maya renderer(and many others) do add some jitter to 8 bit images in order to break up any banding that occurs, but it doesn't always work.