Rendering

Rendering creates a 2D image or animation based on your 3D scene. It shades the scene’s geometry using the lighting you’ve set up, the materials you’ve applied, and environment settings such as background and atmosphere. Max includes a Scanline Renderer that is optimized to speed up this process, and several settings exist that you can use to make this process even faster. Understanding the Render Scene dialog box and its functions can save you many headaches and computer cycles.

Rendering Menu

The Rendering menu contains commands for rendering scenes, setting up environmental and render effects, composing scenes with Video Post, and accessing the RAM Player.

The Render command opens the Render Scene dialog box where you can set output options such as which frames to render and the final image size.

Environment displays the Environment panel, which is used for setting up atmospheric and background effects such as a background color or image, global lighting settings, and atmospheric effects such as Combustion, Fog, and Volume Lights.

The Effects command opens the Rendering Effects dialog box. You use the Rendering Effects dialog box to add rendered effects to an image without having to use the Video Post dialog box.

The Advanced Lighting command opens a control panel where the settings for the Light Tracer, Radiosity, Exposure Control, and Lighting Analysis tools are located.

Rendering to texture, or “texture baking,” allows you to create texture maps based on an object’s appearance in the rendered scene. The textures are then “baked” into the object: that is, they become part of the object via mapping, and can be used to display the textured object rapidly on Direct3D devices such as graphics display cards or game engines.

The Raytracer Settings command opens a dialog box for enabling raytracing options, and the Raytrace Global Include/Exclude command opens a dialog box where you can specify which objects are rendered using raytracing and which are not.

The Mental ray Messages Window displays log messages (other than debug messages) generated by the mental ray renderer.

The ActiveShade Floater opens the ActiveShade window, where you can get immediate rendered results. The ActiveShade Viewport command displays the immediate rendered results in the active viewport.

The Material Editor provides functions to create and edit materials and maps. The Material Editor (keyboard shortcut, M) and Material/Map Browser commands open their respective dialog boxes for creating, defining, and applying materials.

The Video Post command opens a dialog box for scheduling and controlling any post-processing work. The dialog box manages events for compositing images and including special effects such as glows, lens effects, and blurs. The Show Last Rendering command immediately recalls the last rendered image produced by the Render command.

The Panorama Exporter command allows you to render a panoramic scene. The Print Size Wizard is a godsend for anyone who is printing images from Max. It relates the current scene to the common paper sizes that printers use. The RAM Player can display images and animations in memory and includes two channels for overlaying images and comparing animations side by side.