Whats the difference between “Maya” and “Maya Software”?
Between Maya version 5 and 7, Alias added a lot of powerful features to the Maya commandline renderer. However, these features also complicated the lives of render managers by completely changing the interface to the program. Originally, you could only use the Maya software renderer, so the product Maya originally referred to that. The Maya (1-5) product still works in this manner With Maya 6, Alias added the ability to select a renderer from the commandline, and made 4 renderers available: Maya Software renderer, Maya Hardware renderer, Maya Vector renderer, and mental ray for Maya. In response, we added Maya Hardware, Maya Vector and MentalRay for Maya Products to Smedge, but still used the Maya product for the default behavior of using the Maya Software renderer to render your scene. Then, Maya 7 added a whole new wrinkle with Render Layers. Render Layers now allow you to use a different renderer for different layers inside the same scene. In order to handle this properly, we change
