Add renderer option

[mottosso]

Goal

Enable specifying which renderer to capture with.

capture(renderer="viewport2")
capture(renderer="legacy")
capture(renderer="highQuality")

Motivation

At the moment, the renderer is specified in display_options={"rendererName": "viewport2"}, with Viewport 2.0 options specified in viewport2_options={}. That is a bit unintuitive. How, for example, would one specify options for hardwarerenderer, or a bespoke renderer?

Make all display options part of one dictionary, and separate rendering option into it's own argument.

[BigRoy]

I'm looking into using capture to perform playblasts (or renders?) that use hardware rendering and include the z-depth buffer into the output format. (e.g. in a iff file). I'm curious as to how to get this going. Any ideas?

[mottosso]

I would like that too.

What's more, I would like a way to Software Render as well, such that playblasts can be made offline and on machines without graphics cards. This sounds like a good step in this direction, as it would change the parameters as significantly as Software Render would (e.g. no HUD).

Maybe we could go the extra mile and actually "reimplement" critical parts of the hud, such as camera name and FPS, in these alternative renders. That might actually make maya-capture offer something other than a wapper to cmds.playblast. A unique value. Lots of studios seem interested in offline playblasts.

As for how to do it, sorry I haven't tried. Have you had a look at whether cmds.playblasts can do it?

[BigRoy]

Have you had a look at whether cmds.playblasts can do it?

Haven't gotten to something usable with that yet. I'm not sure it can even do hardware of software renders like that. Honestly I haven't investigated it too deeply yet but I'm very interested in the possible solutions.