3ds Max 2012 Bible - Kelly L. Murdock [88]
The mental ray panel includes options for making an object generate and/or receive caustics and global illumination.
Cross-Reference
Advanced Lighting is covered in Chapter 45, “Working with Advanced Lighting, Light Tracing, and Radiosity,” and the mental ray renderer is covered in Chapter 47, “Rendering with mental ray and iray.” •
Using the User-Defined panel
The User-Defined panel contains a simple text window. In this window, you can type any sort of information. This information is saved with the scene and can be referred to as notes about an object.
Hiding and Freezing Objects
Hidden and frozen objects cannot be selected, and as such they cannot be moved from their existing positions. This becomes convenient when you move objects around in the scene. If you have an object in a correct position, you can freeze it to prevent it from being moved accidentally or you can hide it from the viewports completely. A key difference between these modes is that frozen objects are still rendered, but hidden objects are not.
You can hide and freeze objects in several ways. You can hide or freeze objects in a scene by selecting the Hide or Freeze options in the Object Properties dialog box. You also can hide and freeze objects using the Display Floater dialog box, which you access by choosing Tools⇒Display Floater.
Tip
Several keyboard shortcuts can be used to hide specific objects. These shortcuts are toggles, so one press makes the objects disappear and another press makes them reappear. Object types that can be hidden with these shortcuts include cameras (Shift+C), geometry (Shift+G), grids (G), helpers (Shift+H), lights (Shift+L), particle systems (Shift+P), shapes (Shift+S), and Space Warps (Shift+W). •
The Hide option makes the selected object in the scene invisible, and the Freeze option turns the selected object dark gray (if the Show Frozen in Gray option in the Object Properties dialog box is enabled) and doesn't allow it to be transformed or selected. You cannot select hidden objects by clicking in the viewport.
Note
When you use the Zoom Extents button to resize the viewports around the current objects, hidden objects aren't included. •
Using the Display Floater dialog box
The Display Floater dialog box includes two tabs: Hide/Freeze and Object Level. The Hide/Freeze tab splits the dialog box into two columns, one for Hide and one for Freeze. Both columns have similar buttons that let you hide or freeze Selected or Unselected objects, By Name or By Hit. The By Name button opens the Select Objects dialog box (which is labeled Hide or Freeze Objects). The By Hit option lets you click in one of the viewports to select an object to hide or freeze. Each column also has additional buttons to unhide or unfreeze All objects, By Name, or in the case of Freeze, By Hit. You also can select an option to Hide Frozen Objects.
Note
Other places to find the same buttons found in the Display Floater are the Hide and Freeze rollouts of the Display panel of the Command Panel and in the right-click quadmenu. •
The Object Level panel of the Display Floater lets you hide objects by category such as All Lights or Cameras. You also can view and change many of the Display Properties that are listed in the Object Properties dialog box.
Figure 6.12 shows the Hide/Freeze and Object Level panels of the Display Floater dialog box.
Using the Display panel
If you took many of the features of the Display Floater and the Object Properties dialog box and mixed them together, the result would be the Display panel. You access this panel by clicking the fifth icon from the left in the Command Panel (the icon that looks like a monitor screen).
The first rollout in the Display panel, shown in Figure 6.13, is the Display Color rollout. This rollout includes options for setting whether Wireframe and Shaded objects in the viewports are displayed