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Rendering Workflow Overview

Here is a typical sequence of tasks you might follow when rendering. You do not need to follow these tasks strictly in the following order.

1. Set up render passes and define their options.

Render passes let you render different aspects of your scene separately, such as a matte pass, a shadow pass, a highlight pass, or a complete beauty pass. You can define as many render passes as you want: within each pass, you can create partitions of lights and objects, then apply shaders and control their settings together. See Passes & Partitions.

2. Set up render channels and define their options.

You can define render channels that allow you to output different information about the pass to separate files. See Render Channels & Framebuffers for details.

3. Set rendering options.

All objects, including lights and cameras, are defined by their rendering properties. For example, you can determine whether a geometric object is visible, whether its reflection is visible, and whether it casts shadows. Rendering properties can be set for the scene, for the specific renderer, and per pass as well. See Managing Rendering Options.

4. Preview the results of any modifications.

The viewports can display your scene in different display modes, including wireframe, hidden-line removal, shaded, and textured.

In addition, you can view any portion of your scene in a viewport and rendered with mental ray by defining a render region. You can preview a full frame using Frame Preview.

For more information about previewing your scene, see Previewing Interactively with the Render Region.

5. Render the passes.

After previewing a few rendered frames, you can render on your local computer or distribute the render across a network of computers. You can render interactively using the options available in the XSI interface, or from the command-line using xsi -r (batch), xsi -script (batch with scripts), and the ray3.exe options.

For more information, see Rendering Methods.

SOFTIMAGE |XSI lets you Distribute the rendering tasks across several machines. To do so, you must define which machines to use and how. For more information, see Distributed Rendering.

6. Composite and apply effects to passes using XSI Illusion, a fully–integrated compositing and effects toolset. You can also use a post-production tool such as Avid®|DS.

For more information about XSI Illusion, see the Compositing and Effects guide.

Rendering and Optimization Tips

If your goal is to find a balance between render quality and speed, see Optimizing a Scene for Rendering for a list of guidelines and methods.

General Memory Requirements

A general rule for calculating memory requirements is to allow 1 MB of memory for every 1000 surface triangles. For every 512 × 512 texture, you need an additional 1 MB of memory.

You can determine how many triangles are in your scene by selecting Edit > Info Scene from the Edit panel.

These rules assume that you’re using raytracing features (reflection, shadows, refraction, etc.). If you are not using raytracing, you can render much larger scenes with this amount of memory.

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