Wire Frame Render

How to render wireframe - Maya

Method 1: “The Best Way” – Mental Ray Contours
Why is it the best?

It does not tessellate your objects. It can be applied to multiple objects without having to do new UV Snapshots. It can render in smooth shaded. It is quick and easy. And it uses the power of mental ray, and can look sweet if you do it right.

Process

1. Assuming you have something to render, create a new material (can be anything that
has a shader group – lambert, blinn, phong, etc.). In this example, I will be creating a
lambert.

2. Call the new material WireFrameMTRL and the shading group WireFrameSG. Who
doesn’t like being a little organized ?

3. Note: If you clicked somewhere else and can’t get to the shading group easily, you can
just go to the Hypershade and find the tab Shading Groups to find it.

4. Go to the newly created lambert’s shading group WireFrameSG.

5. Open the mental ray -> Contours tab.

6. Note: If it isn’t there, you need to enable mental ray in your plug-ins Manager. Mental ray
is called “Mayatomr.dll” so find it and load it.

7. Click Enable Contour Rendering.

8. Set the color to something you’d like. I like white.

9. Set the width to something like 0.2 – 1.0. This setting is the absolute width of the wire
frame lines. You can comeback and play with this later.

10. Apply the material to the object.

11. Open Render Settings

12. Select render using Mental Ray (if it’s not there, go see the note for #4).

13. Find the Contours Tab (it is under the features tab in 2009)

14. Select Enable Contour Rendering

15. Open the Draw By Property Difference Tab

16. Select Around All Poly Faces

17. Render!

And that is the easiest and most consistent way to get wireframe without the flaws of the other
methods.