X-Ray works similar to game engines like Unreal, where you bake light and reflection and use them on your objects.
X-Ray uses Maya’s default Light and Shaders so to some degree you should already be familiar with how everything works but just to be sure that you can get the most out of X-Ray. I will try to explain everything again in this manual.
Render Engine:
The current version of X-Ray is focused to use the render engines that already existed in Maya. it uses Arnold for light baking.
when you want to use X-Ray set Arnold as your render engine.
Future Versions:
I will work on adding the option to use V-Ray and Redshift for light baking in future,the idea is to get the best out of each render engine.
so if you have a redshift license and you like its speed and quality of lighting you can use that for light baking but if you think Redshift is not good in SSS and you like the quality of Arnold in that area you can use Arnold just for SSS, and see the mix result of all theses render engines in real-time right in viewport.
The early tests were promising but it still needs a lot more coding to add all render engines and get it to a fast and usable condition. The SSS and light baking feature currently work with Turtle, other render engines will be available soon.
Lightmap:
Lightmap is a file map that stores lighting information of your object. if you are familiar with UE4 the whole process is very similar to Unreal Engine light baking, but here you have much more control and accuracy.
Lightmap UV:
To generate proper lightmap you need non-overlapping UVs. The UVs are stored in the second UVset of your object, this UVset is called “LightmapUV”.
Reflection map:
Reflection map is a spherical map of the environment, captured by the reflection actor. in X-Ray you use reflection maps to add reflection to objects in the scene.
Reflection actor:
A special object that will be used to capture the map of the environment. unlike Unreal Engine, reflection actors on X-Ray are per object, this will give you greater control over your reflections.
SSS map:
You might be familiar with real-time SSS Shaders in other renderers like Evee, in X-Ray we use Pre-Computed maps for SSS, this will give you a production quality SSS, and your real-time SSS material in X-Ray will look as good as they look in an offline render engine like Arnold.
Z-Depth map:
This map will store depth information of the scene.
can be used to add Fog or DOF effect in post-process