8

Sampling Quality Rollout (mental ray Renderer) 99
(fully opaque, or 255 in eight-bit encoding).
Default=0.05.
•
Co lor swatch—Click to display a Color Selector
(page 1–157)
to let you interactively specify the
R,G,andBthresholdvalues.
Note: The spinners in the Color Selector show
the eight-bit values for color components,
which range from 0 to 255, rather than the
normalized va lues used in the Sampling Qua lity
rollout, which range from 0.0 to 1.0.
Temporal—If samples from frame to frame differ
by more than this color, the mental ray renderer
does recursive supersampling, up to the depth
specified by Maximum, above. Decreasing the
Temporal contrast values increases t he amount of
sampling done, and can improve the quality of
motion blur at the cost of rendering t ime.
Tip: If motion blur appears grainy, decrease the
RGB value of the Temporal contrast color.
•
R, G, B, A , a nd color swatch—These controls are
the same for the Temporal t hreshold as they are
for the Spatial threshold.
Options group
Lock S a mpl es —When on, the mental ray renderer
uses the same sampling pattern for ever y frame
of an animation. When off, the mental ray
renderer introduces a quasi-random (Monte
Carlo)variationinthesamplepatternfromframe
to frame. Default=on.
Varying the sample pattern reduces rendering
artifacts in animations.
Jitter—Introduces a variation into sample
locations; see
Sampling (page 3–1099) .Turning
on Jitter can help reduce aliasing. Default=off.
Bucket Width—To render the scene, the mental ray
renderer subdivides the image into buckets. The
smaller the bucket size, the more image updates are
generated during rendering. Updating the image
consumes a certain amount of CPU cycles. For
scenes w ith l ittle complexity, smaller buckets can
increase the rendering time, while larger buckets
can make things render faster. For more complex
scenes, the reverse is true. Default=48 pixels.
Bucket Order—Lets you specify the method by
which mental ray chooses the next bucket. If you
are using placeholders or distributed rendering,
you should always use the default Hilbert order.
Otherwise, you can choose a method based on
how you prefer to see the image appear as it
renders in the Rendered Frame Window.
•
Hilbert (best)—(The default.) The next bucket
chosen is the one that will trigger the fewest
data t r ansfers.
Tip: Always use Hilbert order when you use
placeholders (see the
Translator Options rollout
(page 3–115)
) or distributed rendering (see the
Distributed Bucket Rendering rollout ( page
3–121)
).
•
Spiral—The buckets begin at the center of the
image, and spiral outward.
•
Left to r ight—Buckets are rendered in columns,
from bottom to top, left to right.
•
Right to left—Buckets are rendered in columns,
from bottom to top, right to left.
•
Top-down—Buckets are rendered in rows, from
right to left, top to bottom.
•
Bottom-up—Buckets are rendered in rows, from
right to l eft, bottom to top.
Fr am e Bu ffe r Typ e—Lets you choose the bit
depth of the output frame buffer:
•
Integer (16 bits per channel)—Outputs 16 bits
per channel of color information. This is
the default output format, and was the only
available metho d prior to 3ds Max 8.
•
Floating-Point (3 2 bits per channel)—Outputs
32 bits per channel of color information.