Rendering Preferences

Some pixel colors are beyond the safe NTSC or PAL threshold. You can choose to flag or modify them to acceptable values.

Flag with Black—Flags all illegal pixels with black to show you the illegality of your image. This mode teaches you how to make correct colors, instead of depending on Scale options. Scale options force a natural discontinuity in the color values. In some cases, that discontinuity can cause visible aliasing.

Scale Luma—Scales the luminance to bring the color into range, and maintains saturation. This generally makes the illegal areas appear darker than they should be.

Scale Saturation—Scales the chroma to bring the color into range, and maintains saturation. Because this option keeps the brightness levels of the pixels fairly equal to the unscaled ones, this is the more useful of the two scale methods.

NTSC/PAL—Determines the standard for the video color check. See NTSC (Glossary) and PAL (Glossary).

Sets output dithering for all file types.

True Color—Turns dithering on or off for any true color output device. For 24-bit work, you should turn True Color on. For paletted work, you can turn it off.

Paletted—Turns dithering on or off for any 8-bit paletted device.

Odd/Even—Selects the field order of rendered images when the Render to Fields option is turned on in the render dialog. Some video devices require that the even field be first, other video devices require that the odd field be first. Determine the correct field order for your video device. If the video output of your device is strobing or appears jittery, it may be due to incorrect field order, try changing this parameter and re-rendering your animation.

Threshold—Keeps the super black threshold above a certain level primarily for luminance keying.

Angle Separation—Locks the spotlight hotspot and falloff cones at the angle separation defined by the spinner (degrees). This option constrains the hotspot angle so that it can't equal the falloff and cause aliasing artifacts.

Don't Antialias Against Background—Ensures that the edges of rendered geometry aren't antialiased against the background. The inside of the geometry is still antialiased. Keep this control off unless you're creating sprites for game development, or require special compositing techniques because the background will not be rendered. In these cases, turning on this option helps avoid generating alpha antialiasing on the outlines of the geometry. Default=off.

Note: You must be rendering against a black background if Don’t Antialias Against Background is turned on.

Filter Background—Controls whether or not a background image is affected by the Renderer’s antialiasing Filter. See Plate Match /MAX R2.5/VIZ R2 Filter Types in Default Scanline Renderer Rollout for detailed information of filtering background and antialiasing.

Use Environment Alpha—Controls whether or not the renderer uses the environment map’s alpha channel in created the alpha for the rendered image. If Use Environment Alpha is turned off, the background is completely transparent. If it is turned on, the alpha of the resulting image is a combination of the scene and image’s alpha. Note that only background images with alpha channels or black backgrounds are supported when compositing in other programs such as Photoshop.

Click the color swatch to change the default ambient light color for renderings. This color will be the darkest color for rendered shadows in the scene.

Nth Serial Numbering—Specifies whether output frame files generated using a frame-step value other than 1 are numbered sequentially (on) or according to their true frame numbers (off).

Beep—Beeps when the rendering has finished. You can set the frequency and the duration.

Play Sound—Plays a sound file when the rendering has finished.

Choose Sound—Opens the Open Sound browser dialog, select a sound file using the browser. You can test sound files with the Play button in the Open Sound dialog. Press ESC to turn off the sound.

Maximum Number—Limits the number of layers that are stored in the G-buffer during rendering. Default=10; Range=1 to 999.

Memory requirements might dictate that you limit the number of G-buffer layers. The RLA and RLF image formats, used for compositing, can store many G-buffers for object Z buffer information, material ID, transparency, and so on.

On—Causes the software to treat the rendering task as separate threads. This option works with multiprocessor systems. Each processor in your computer handles a different thread, which makes full use of available processing power and speeds up rendering to its maximum level. When off, Autodesk VIZ treats a rendering task as a single processing task and doesn't divide it up.

The Bitmap Pager can help with the rendering of scenes that have very large textures, a large number of textures, or when rendering a high-resolution image.

Tip: You can access a Bitmap Pager Statistics dialog with useful pager information such as memory usage: Go to Customize menu > Customize User Interface, find the Bitmap Pager Statistics Toggle item in the Main UI list, and then assign it as a keyboard shortcut or other UI element.

On—When turned on, the software creates a series of temporary “page” files on the drive where it is installed for use in rendering bitmaps.

Page Size (kB)—Sets the size of the bitmap page. If textures are smaller than the page size, the system allocates only the memory required.

Bitmap Size Threshold (kB)—Sets the minimum size (in kilobytes) that a bitmap must be in order to be paged.

Memory Pool (kB)—Controls the amount of memory used by the pager. All pages remain in memory until this limit is reached. When the limit is reached, the pager begins saving pages to disk. Pages that are not frequently used are paged out; more frequently used pages are kept in memory.