RenderView Extension 1.9.9 for Maya (maya script)

The concept of the script is to make the basic Maya Render View much more efficient to use and make rendering related modifications easier. (Things like adding data to images, render text onto the image, render / load and save multiple frames, modify render settings and approximations and lots of other stuff.)

1.99 - News:
        - Maya 2013, 2014, 2015 support.
        - Beware: Maya 2014 and 2015 support is quite experimental, I haven't used the script a lot with these releases.

- Both "Render Frame" and "IPR Render" buttons are modified to have a camera selection popup menu when clicking with the right mouse button.
- The scene preparation and render time is displayed at the bottom of the renderView After rendering a frame.
- A new Snapshot button added, with the usual right button camera selection menu.
- Render Diagnostics button is removed since it is in the upper menu and it's a rarely used tool. (And we need space for panel mode. :)
- Color button is extended with a right click menu for all the available display types. (Color/Alpha/R/G/B/Luminance)
- Alpha button removed. Now left clicking the Color button toggles color and alpha channel display.

- Right clicking on the Render Globals button brings up a menu to set things without opening the clumsy Render Globals Window:
Raytracing on/off
Render All / Selected only (+ an option for automatic selection for rendering)
Render Quality (Containing user presets)
Motion Blur (off/2d/3d)
Render options (Use Default Light on/off, Depth-Map Shadows, Composite (No premultiply), Paint Effects render, Oversample Paint Effects
Turn All Image Planes on/off (either at once or only at render time)
Select Active (renderable) Camera and set Output Channels (Color/Alpha/Depth)
Image Format (including user defined image formats if there is any defined in the userImageFormats.mel)
+ in case of Mental Ray:
Final Gathering, Global Illumination, Caustics, Displacement, Shadows on/off

Approximation editing: create, assign and edit approximations from the render view. (Works with any number and any type of selected objects)
Translation Verbosity
When choosing a different MR render quality preset switches like raytracing and FG remain the same (only the values change).

- Framestore button:
Set Render-info display - GUI to set what kind of information should be displayed in the bottom of the RenderView
Open the mayaImageTool Window - GUI to modify image names, check and compare rendered data, save images, add comments.
Auto-open the mayaImageTool window - Checkbox to automatically open the mIT window after every render.

Add note to rendered image - Renders user defined information on the bottom of the image.
(Date is added as Year/Month/Day)
Save kept images to disk - Option box lets you define a specific filename instead of the current image name set in the render globals.)
Load previously saved images from disk
Delete previously saved images from disk
Remove all images from RenderView

- Preview Resolution button to quickly display and modify the test resoluion. (with a new 75% resolution option)
- Ray Tracing On/Off button that displays the current state of raytracing. Right clicking this button brings up a new marking menu to set Mental Ray sampling parameters directly, like easily multiply/divide all the sampling contrast values together.

- The Renderer selection menu has new menuitems to load the currently unloaded renderers.

- Exposure slider. Right click menu allows setting the default value.



Render Utilites (a new menu in the renderView):

- "Render Multiple Frames" lets you render any number of different images (or image region) into the Render View or directly to disk. You can generate sequences based on start frame/end frame/step count or add frames manually and assign a new camera to any frame. (This camera will be used until you define a new one in the list.) You can easily render many frames using different cameras for preview, check animation key positions or render a whole animation within Maya. (This is slower than batch mode but it can fix render problems that are known to happen sometimes while using mayabatch. :) Read button annotations for further details.

- "Display Mental Ray Tesselation" renders the wireframe image of the selected object(s). This feature displays the effect of the currently assigned approximations. The render uses the current resolution with min=max=0 sampling, and the basic mental ray contour calculation method to avoid installing custom shaders.