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Figure 41-2: You can view the ActiveShade window in a viewport.

Render Parameters

Commands and settings for rendering an image are contained within the Render Scene dialog box. This dialog box includes several tabbed panels.

After you’re comfortable with the scene file and you’re ready to render a file, you need to open the Render Scene dialog box, shown in Figure 41-3, by means of the Rendering Render menu command (F10) or by clicking the Render Scene button on the main toolbar. This dialog box has several panels: Common, Renderer, Render Elements, Raytracer, and Advanced Lighting. The Common panel includes commands that are common for all renderers, but the Renderer panel includes specific settings for the selected renderer.

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Figure 41-3: You use the Render Scene dialog box to render the final output.

Initiating a render job

At the bottom of the Render Scene dialog box are several controls that are visible for all panels; these controls let you initiate a render job. The render modes are Production and ActiveShade. Each of these modes can use a different renderer with different render settings as defined using the Assign Renderer rollout.

The Preset option lets you save and load a saved preset of renderer settings. When saving or loading a preset, the Select Preset Categories dialog box, shown in Figure 41-4, opens (after selecting a preset file in a file dialog box). In this dialog box, you can select which panels of settings to include in the preset. The panels listed will depend on the renderer that is selected. All presets are saved to the disk as files with the .RPS file extension.

The Viewport drop-down list includes all the available viewports. When the Render Scene dialog box opens, the currently active viewport appears in the Viewport drop-down list. The one selected is the one that gets rendered when you click the Render button. The Render button starts the rendering process. You can click the Render button without changing any settings, and the default parameters are used.

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Figure 41-4: The Select Preset Categories dialog box lets you choose which settings to include in the preset.

When you click the Render button, the Rendering dialog box appears. This dialog box, shown in Figure 41-5, displays all the settings for the current render job and tracks its progress. The Rendering dialog box also includes Pause and Cancel buttons for halting the rendering process. If the rendering is stopped, the Rendering dialog box disappears, but the Rendered Frame Window stays open.

Tip After you’ve set up the render settings for an image, you can re-render an image without opening the Render Scene dialog box by clicking the Quick Render button on the main toolbar or by using the Shift+Q keyboard shortcut.

Common parameters

The Common Parameters rollout in the Render Scene dialog box includes the same controls regardless of the renderer being used.

The Time Output section defines which animation frames to include in the output. The Single option renders the current frame specified by the Time Slider. The Active Time Segment option renders the complete range of frames. The Range option lets you set a unique range of frames to render by entering the beginning and ending frame numbers. The last option is Frames, where you can enter individual frames and ranges using commas and hyphens. For example, entering “1, 6, 8-12” renders frames 1, 6, and 8 through 12. The Every Nth Frame value is active for the Active Time Segment and Range options. It renders every nth frame in the active segment. For example, entering 3 would cause every third frame to be rendered. This option is useful for sped-up animations. The File Number Base is the number to add or subtract from the current frame number for the reference numbers attached to the end of each image file. For example, a File Number Base value of 10 for a Range value of 1–10 would label the files as image0011, image0012, and so on.

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The Image Aspect is the ratio of the image width to its height. You can also set the Pixel Aspect ratio to correct rendering on different devices. Both of these values have lock icons to

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their left that lock the aspect ratio for the set resolution. Locking the aspect ratio automatically changes the Width dimension whenever the Height value is changed and vice versa. The Aperture Width, Image Aspect, and Pixel Aspect values can be set only when Custom is selected in the drop-down list.

The Options section includes the following options:

Atmospherics: Renders any atmospheric effects that are set up in the Environment dilog box.

Effects: Enables any Render Effects that have been set up.

Displacement: Enables any surface displacement caused by an applied displacement map.

Video Color Check: Enables a check for nonsafe NTSC or PAL colors. Nonsafe colors are displayed incorrectly when these formats are used.

Render to Fields: Enables animations to be rendered as fields. Fields are used by video formats. Video animations include a field with every odd scan line and one field with every even scan line. These fields are composited when displayed.

Render Hidden Geometry: Renders all objects in the scene, including hidden objects. Using this option, you can hide objects for quick viewport updates and include them in the final rendering.

Area Lights/Shadows as Points: Rendering area lights and shadows can be time consuming, but point lights render much quicker. By enabling this option, you can speed the rendering process.

Force 2-Sided: Renders both sides of every face. This option essentially doubles the render time and should be used only if singular faces or the inside of an object are visible.

Super Black: Enables Super Black, which is used for video compositing. Rendered images with black backgrounds have trouble in some video formats. The Super Black option prevents these problems.

The Advanced Lighting panel offers options to use Advanced Lighting or Computer Advanced Lighting when Required. Advanced lighting can take a long time to compute, so these two options give you the ability to turn advanced lighting on or off.

Cross- Advanced lighting is covered in more detail in Chapter 28, “Advanced Lighting and Light

Reference Tracing.”

The Render Output section enables you to output the image or animations to a file, a device, or the Rendered Frame Window. To save the output to a file, click the Files button and select a location in the Render Output File dialog box. Supported formats include .AVI, .BMP, .DDS, Postscript (.EPS), JPEG, Kodak Cineon (.CIN), .FLC, Radiance Image File (.HDRI), QuickTime

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(.MOV), .PNG, .RLA, .RPF, SGI’s Format (.RGB), Targa (.TGA), and .TIF. The Device button can output to a device such as a video recorder. If the Rendered Frame Window option is selected, then both the Files and Devices buttons are disabled. (The Rendered Frame Window is discussed later in this chapter.)

The Net Render option enables network rendering. The Skip Existing Images option doesn’t replace any images with the same filename, a feature that you can use to continue a rendering job that has been canceled.

E-mail notifications

The process of rendering an animation (or even a single frame) can be brief or it can take several days depending on the complexity of the scene. For complex scenes that will take a while to render, you can configure Max to send you an e-mail when your rendering is complete or if it fails. These options are in the Email Notifications rollout, shown in Figure 41-6.

In addition to the options, you can enter who the e-mail is from, who it is to, and an SMTP Server.

Figure 41-6: The Email Notifications rollout includes options for sending an e-mail to report on rendering status.

Assigning renderers

To change the default renderer, look in the Assign Renderer rollout in the Common panel of the Render Scene dialog box (F10), shown in Figure 41-7. Here you can select different renderers for the Production, Material Editor, and ActiveShade modes. For each, you can select from the Default Scanline Renderer, the mental ray Renderer, or the VUE File Renderer.

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Figure 41-7: The Assign Renderer rollout in the Render Scene dialog box lets you select which render engine to use.

The lock next to the Material Editor option indicates that the same renderer is used for both Production and Material Editor.

Scanline A-Buffer renderer

The Default Scanline Renderer rollout, found in the Renderer panel and shown in Figure 41-8, is the default renderer rollout that appears in the Render Scene dialog box. If a different renderer is loaded, then a different rollout for that renderer is displayed in the Renderer panel.

Figure 41-8: The Default Scanline Renderer rollout includes settings unique to this renderer.

You can use the Options section at the top of the Default Scanline Renderer rollout to quickly disable various render options for quicker results. These options include Mapping, Shadows, Auto Reflect/Refract and Mirrors, and Force Wireframe. For the Force Wireframe option, you can define a Wire Thickness value in pixels. The Enabled SSE option uses Streaming SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) Extensions to speed up the rendering process by processing more data per instruction.

Tip Intel Pentium III and later processors include the SSE instructions and can benefit from enabling this option.

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Anti-alias filters

Another way to speed up rendering is to disable the Anti-aliasing and Filter Maps features. Anti-aliasing smoothes jagged edges that appear where colors change. The Filter Maps option allows you to disable the computationally expensive process of filtering material maps. The Filter drop-down list lets you select image filters that are applied at the pixel level during rendering. Below the drop-down list is a description of the current filter. The Filter Size value applies only to the Soften filter. Available filters include the following:

Area: Does an anti-aliasing sweep using the designated area specified by the Filter Size value.

Blackman: Sharpens the image with a 25-pixel area. It provides no edge enhancement.

Blend: Somewhere between a sharp and a coarse Soften filter. It includes Filter Size and Blend values.

Catmull-Rom: Sharpens with a 25-pixel filter and includes edge enhancement.

Cook Variable: Can produce sharp results for small Filter Size values and blurred images for larger values.

Cubic: Based on cubic-spline curves and produces a blurring effect.

Mitchell-Netravali: Includes Blur and Ringing parameters.

Plate Match/MAX R2: Matches mapped objects against background plates as used in Max R2.

Quadratic: Based on a quadratic spline and produces blurring with a 9-pixel area.

Sharp Quadratic: Produces sharp effects from a 9-pixel area.

Soften: Causes mild blurring and includes a Filter Size value.

Video: Blurs the image using a 25-pixel filter optimized for NTSC and PAL video.

SuperSampling

Global SuperSampling is an additional anti-aliasing process that you can apply to materials. This process can improve image quality, but it can take a long time to render; you can disable it using the Disable all Samplers option. Supersampling can be enabled in the Material Editor for specific materials, but the SuperSampling rollout in the Material Editor also includes an option to Use Global Settings. The Global Settings are defined in the Default Scanline Renderer rollout.

Max includes anti-aliasing filters as part of the rendering process. You have several SuperSampling methods to choose from.

SuperSampling can be enabled even if the Antialiasing option is disabled. Global Supersampling can be enabled using the Enable Global Supersampler option.

In a SuperSampling pass, the colors at different points around the center of a pixel are sampled. These samples are then used to compute the final color of each pixel. Max has four available SuperSampling methods: Max 2.5 Star, Hammersley, Adaptive Halton, and Adaptive Uniform.