3rd Year: Workflow Rendering & Sets

I'm still trying to work out how Sets work in Maya, but I think I've worked out how they work, obviously any feedback is appreciated. I do have notes on this but they definitely need improving so once again, and feedback just lay it on me, but I think I've got the jist of it.

Okay, so sets (long story short) are the literal 'set'/'settings' for how a scene/render is rendered. Do not mistake this with the actual render settings, as they are separate from sets as far as I know. But before we look at sets we need to learn about Sub-Divisions within the Arnold Tab.

So in this scene, the mushroom is on unsmoothed (1), in our render view it appears blocky, showing our unsmoothed geometry.

However, in this scene, we can see that in the render view our object is smoothed? The reason being is because the settings have been changed to render out this object with more iterations and on the Catclark setting. But notice in the viewport how our object is still unsmoothed, this is a huge benefit to the workflow of either modelling or rendering something because you are able to check out how a model or a texture is working on the fly without spending loads of time on one render and it wont slow down your viewport.

Now there are two options in that deserve special attention, the first being Type.

Type: None

Type: Linear

Type: Catclark

There are three different 'Types', None renders the object exactly how it is, Linear (Depending on the Iterations) will add subdivisions to the render, but will not effect the overall shape. Catclark will render the object as if it were smoothed.

Then we have iterations, which basically means how many iterations do you want in the render? So if you want to render out a Type: Catclark out at good smoothed quality, you would put up your iterations.

So how does this apply to sets? Well there are settings you can change in a set in order to render everything out as smoothed, rather than smooth it in the viewport, which can drastically affect your rendertimes and well as your viewport speeds.
 

So now that these traits have been added the set can now be customised to say "Whatever is within this Set, Render with these settings, None, Linear, Catclark. Its just like adding a trait to a control via connection editor, but its just a different screen.

Before rendering though, make sure the objects that will be rendered are inside the set, otherwise it will use the standard rendering set, rather than your chosen render set.

I'm sure there is a lot more to this trick, but I can see how this is going to be super handy, not having to spend a long time waiting for my viewport to load, now I can just pop on a set and use that to render.

Once again, this is something I don't know everything about this, so if there are any