3ds Max 2012 Bible - Kelly L. Murdock [277]
For each resolution, you can change the Width and Height values. Each resolution also has six preset buttons for setting these values.
Tip
You can set the resolutions of any of the preset buttons by right-clicking the button that you want to change. The Configure Preset dialog box opens, where you can set the button's Width, Height, and Pixel Aspect values. •
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 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.
Render options
The Options section includes the following options:
• Atmospherics: Renders any atmospheric effects that are set up in the Environment dialog 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: Displays any colors that cannot be displayed in the HSV (hue, saturation, and value) color space used by television in black.
• Render to Fields: Enables animations to be rendered as fields. Fields are used by video formats. Video animations include one 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 more quickly. 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 section offers options to use Advanced Lighting or Compute 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-Reference
Advanced lighting is covered in more detail in Chapter 45, “Working with Advanced Lighting, Light Tracing, and Radiosity.” •
Bitmap Proxies
The Bitmap Proxies section includes a Setup button to enable a feature that can downscale all maps for the current scene. Clicking the Setup button opens the Global Settings and Defaults for Bitmap Proxies dialog box, shown in Figure 23.4.
FIGURE 23.4
The Bitmap Proxies dialog box lets you replace all texture maps with proxy images.
The Downscale map option lets you select to downscale all maps to Half, Third, Quarter, or Eighth, or to their current size. This lets you create your scene with high-quality maps and quickly reduce their sizes as needed without having to open and scale each individual map. The Proxy System lets you select to use a proxy image if the current map is larger than a specified size in pixels.
This dialog box also lets you set the Render Mode to be optimized for performance or memory. The options include Render with Proxies, Render with Full Resolution and Keep them [image maps] In Memory, and Render with Full Resolution and Free up the Memory once Rendered. If you enable the Page Large Images to Disk, large textures and rendered images are split into pages, which frees up memory, but it can make the update of the scene slower when a new page has to be recalled. The page file location can be specified.