8

Environment Panel 271
lighteffectbychangingtheambientlightcolorata
nonzero frame with the Auto Key button on.
Atmosphere rollout
Effects—Shows the queue of effects that were
added.Theeffectsareevaluatedinlinearorder
within the scene during rendering. Depend ing on
the selected effect, the Env ironment dialog adds
the appropriate rollout for the effect’s parameters.
Name—Givesacustomnametoeffectsinthelist.
For example, you might have different custom
settings for different k inds of fire, that you could
name S park and Fir eball.
Add—Displays the Add Atmospheric Effect dialog
(all currently installed atmospheric effects). Select
an effect and click OK to assign an effect to the list.
Delete—Deletes a selected atmospheric effect from
the list.
Active—Sets the on/off state for the indiv idual
effects in the list. This is a convenient way to isolate
effects within a list of complicated atmospheric
functions.
Move Up / Move Down—Moves the selected item in
the list up or down to change the order in which
the atmospheric effects are applied.
Merge—Merges effects from other 3ds Max scene
files.
When you click Merge, the Merge Atmospheric
Effectsdialogappears.Choosea3dsMaxscene,
and then click Open. The Merge Atmospheric
Effects dia log then lists the effects in the scene that
canbemerged.Selectoneormoreoftheeffects,
and then click OK to merge them into the scene.
The list shows the names of the atmospheric effects
only, but when you merge an effect, the lights or
gizmosboundtothateffectaremergedaswell.If
one of these objects you’re merging has the same
name as one already in the scene, an alert appears
giving you the following choices:
•Youcanrenametheincomingobjectby
changing its name in the editable field.
• You can Merge the incoming object without
renaming, resulting in two objects in the scene
w ith the same name.
• You can delete the existing object in the scene
by select ing the Delete Old button.
• You can select Apply To All Duplicates, which
performs the same action to all subsequent
matching objects.
Note: To control w hether or not the renderer
uses the environment map’s alpha channel
in creating the alpha for the rendered image,
choose Customize > Preferences > Rendering,
andthenturnonUseEnvironmentAlphain
the Background Antialiasing group.