Rendering Method

Determines how the software displays objects.

Smooth+Highlights—Renders objects with smooth shading and displays specular highlights. To toggle quickly between Smooth+Highlights and Wireframe, press F3.

Smooth—Renders objects with smooth shading only.

Facets+Highlights—Renders objects with flat shading and displays specular highlights.

Facets—Renders polygons as flat surfaces, shaded but with no smoothing or highlights.

Flat—Renders each polygon in its raw, unshaded diffuse color, disregarding any contribution from ambient lighting or light sources. This rendering method is useful when it's more important to see each polygon than to see its shading. It's also a good way to check the results of bitmaps created with Render to Texture.

Hidden Line—A wireframe mode that hides faces and vertices with normals pointing away from the viewpoint, as well as any parts of objects that are obscured by closer objects. In this display mode only, the wireframe color is determined by the Viewports > Hidden Line Unselected color, not the object or material color. See Colors Panel.

Lit Wireframes—Renders objects as wireframes with flat shading.

Wireframe—Draws objects as wireframes with no shading applied. To toggle quickly between Wireframe and Smooth+Highlights, press F3.

Bounding Box—Draws objects as bounding boxes with no shading applied. A bounding box is defined as the smallest box that completely encloses an object.

Edged Faces—Available only when the current viewport is in a shaded mode, such as Smooth, Smooth+Highlights, Facets+Highlights, or Facets. When Edged Faces is on in these modes, the wireframe edges of objects appear along with the shaded surfaces. This is helpful for editing meshes in a shaded display. Press F4 to toggle Edged Faces display.

Edges are displayed using the object wireframe color, while surfaces use material colors (if a material is assigned). This lets you create contrasting colors between the shaded surfaces and the wireframe edges. You can switch these around in the Display Color rollout in the Display panel.

None—Objects with transparency assigned appear completely opaque, regardless of the transparency settings.

Simple—Objects with transparency assigned are displayed with a “screen door” transparency effect.

Best—Objects with transparency assigned are displayed with a two-pass transparency effect.

This option is smoother and closer to rendered transparency effects.

Applies the current settings to the active viewport only, to all viewports, or to all the viewports except the active one.

Note: This applies to the currently active viewport only; it is not a dynamic function.

These check boxes modify either the shading modes or the wireframe modes. They refer to the viewport renderer only, not to the scanline renderer or any other renderer.

Disable View—Disables the Apply To viewport selection. A disabled viewport behaves like any other viewport while active. However, when you change the scene in another viewport, the view in the disabled viewport does not change until you next activate it. Use this function to speed up screen redraws when you are working on complex geometry.

Disable Textures—Select to turn off display of texture maps assigned to objects. Turn off to show the maps assigned to objects.

Texture Correction—Redraws the viewport using pixel interpolation (perspective-corrected). The redrawn image remains until you force the viewport to redraw for any reason. This command has an effect only when the viewport is shaded and at least one object's map is displayed.

Z-Buffer Wireframe Objects—Draws the wires ordered according to depth in the scene. Otherwise wires may be drawn out of order to speed the viewport display. This option is generally needed only when sub-object selections are "hidden" by lines drawn out of order. For example, you select the front edges of a box, but they don’t appear highlighted in red, because the white lines from the rear may get drawn last. Activate this only if you find that selections are obscured or if you need the viewport redrawn from back to front.

Force 2-Sided—Set to render both sides of faces. See 2-Sided. Turn off to render only faces with normals toward the viewer. Usually, you'll want to keep this option off to speed redraw time. You might want to turn it on if you need to see the inside as well as the outside of objects, or if you've imported complex geometry in which the face normals are not properly unified.

Note: This switch has no effect when the Direct3D graphics driver is active. In this case, to control the visibility of backfacing faces in the viewports, use the Display Properties > Backface Cull switch.

Default Lighting—Turn on to use default lighting. Turn off to use the lights created in the scene. If no lights exist in the scene, the default lighting is used automatically, even when this check box is off. Default=on.

Sometimes the lighting you create in the scene makes the objects difficult to see in the viewport. The default lighting displays the objects with even illumination. You can use either one or two lights. By default, Autodesk VIZ uses two default lights.

Shade Selected Faces—Faces selected in the viewport are displayed in a red semitransparent state when this is turned on, letting you see the faces you’ve selected when the Shading Mode is Smooth+Highlighted. To toggle Shade Selected Faces, press F2.

Use Selection Brackets—Toggles the display of white selection brackets in the viewport display. Turn this off in complex scenes when the display of multiple selection brackets obscures the required view of selected objects.

Display Selected with Edged Faces—Toggles the display of highlighted edges for selected objects when the viewport is in a shaded mode, such as Smooth, Smooth+Highlights, Facets+Highlights, or Facets. When on in these modes, the wireframe edges of selected objects appear along with the shaded surfaces. This is helpful when selecting multiple objects or small objects.

Viewport Clipping—When turned on, interactively sets a near and far range for viewport display. Two arrows at the edge of the viewport allow you to determine where the clipping will occur. Tick marks correspond to the extents of the viewport, the lower tick is the near clipping plane, and the upper tick sets the far clipping plane. This does not affect the rendering to output, only the viewport display.

Fast View Nth Faces—When turned on, speeds screen redraw by displaying fewer faces. The Nth Faces spinner sets the number of faces that are displayed when the Fast View mode is active. For example, a setting of 3 displays every third face.

Field Of View—Sets the field of view angle for a Perspective viewport. This spinner is not available when any other viewport type is active. You can change the Camera field of view in the Modify panel.