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At the top of the frame buffer window are several controls and icon buttons.

The Edit Region button is activated when the Region option is selected. It lets you drag the center of the area to move it around or drag the edge and corner handles of the region to resize the render area. This option lets you precisely define the area that is rendered.

The Auto Region Selected option automatically sets the render region to the current selection in the viewports.

The Lock to Viewport causes all renders to be done used the specified viewport, regardless of which viewport is active. Using this option you can lock the renders to the Perspective viewport even if you're using a different viewport.

The Render Setup button opens the Render Scene dialog box.

The Environment and Effects Dialog button opens this dialog box, which includes the Exposure Control settings.

The first is the Save Bitmap button, which enables you to save the current frame buffer image.

The Copy Bitmap button copies the image in the Rendered Frame Window to the Windows clipboard where you can paste it into another application like Photoshop.

The Clone Rendered Frame Window button creates another frame buffer dialog box. Any new rendering is rendered to this new dialog box, which is useful for comparing two images.

The Print Image button sends the rendered image to the default printer.

The Clear button erases the image from the window.

The next five buttons enable the red, green, blue, alpha, and monochrome channels. The alpha channel holds any transparency information for the image. The alpha channel is a grayscale map, with black showing the transparent areas and white showing the opaque areas. Next to the Display Alpha Channel button is the Monochrome button, which displays the image as a grayscale image.

The Channel Display drop-down list lets you select the channel to display. The color swatch at the right shows the color of the currently selected pixel. You can select new pixels by right-clicking and holding on the image. This temporarily displays a small dialog box with the image dimensions and the RGB value of the pixel directly under the cursor. The color in the color swatch can then be dragged and dropped in other dialog boxes such as the Material Editor.

The Toggle UI Overlays button causes the frame that marks the region area to be visible when rendered.

The Toggle UI button hides the top selection of controls in the Rendered Frame Window.

Previewing with ActiveShade

The ActiveShade window gives a quick semi-rendered look at the current scene. You can open an ActiveShade display within a viewport by clicking the viewport label in the upper-left corner of each viewport and choosing Views⇒ActiveShade from the pop-up menu.

Note

The ActiveShade window used to be quite valuable, but now that Max can render lights and shadows in the viewport, the ActiveShade window isn't as helpful. •

Only one ActiveShade viewport can be open at a time. If you try to open more than one window, a warning dialog box lets you know that opening it will close the previous window.

Tip

You can drag materials from the Material Editor and drop them directly on the ActiveShade window. •

Using the RAM Player

Just as you can use the Rendered Frame Window to view and compare rendered images, the RAM Player enables you to view rendered animations in memory. With animations loaded in memory, you can selectively change the frame rates. Figure 23.10 shows the RAM Player interface, which you open by choosing Rendering⇒RAM Player. You see two images of the rendered gingerbread house placed on top of each other with half of each showing. One was rendered using its default materials and the other was rendered using Ink 'n' Paint materials.

FIGURE 23.10

The RAM Player interface lets you load two different images or animations for comparison.

The buttons at the top of the RAM Player interface window, shown in Table 23.2, enable you to load an image to two different channels named A and B. The two Open Channel buttons open a file dialog box where you can select