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18 Chapter 17: Rendering
There are two ActiveShade options:
•
Viewport—The ActiveShade rendering appears
in the act ive viewpor t.
•
Floater —The ActiveShade rendering
appearsinitsownwindow.
Only one ActiveShade w indow can be active at
atime. IfyouchooseoneoftheActiveShade
commands while an Ac t iveShade window is
already active, you get an alert that asks whether
you want to close the previous one. If the previous
ActiveShade window was docked in a viewpor t,
the viewpor t reverts to the view it previously
showed.
Tip: You can drag and drop materials from the
Material Editor (page 2–1253) to ActiveShade
windows and viewport s, as you can with other
viewports.
Note: You can’t make a m axim ized viewport
an ActiveShade window, or maximize an
ActiveShade window .
ActiveSh ade Comma nds
When you right-click an ActiveShade window,
the
quad menu (page 3–741) displays an
ActiveShade menu. This menu contains a number
of
ActiveShade commands (page 3–21) .
ActiveSha de and Object S election
If you select an object b efore you invoke
ActiveShade, ActiveShade is done only for that
object. This can greatly increase the speed of
ActiveShade.
Similarly, once the A ctiveShade window is open,
the
initialize and update steps (page 3–998)
(whether automatic or manual) are done only for
the selected object.
In a "docked" ActiveShade viewport, you can
select objects by rig ht-clicking, tur ning on Select
Object in the Tools (lower-right) quadrant of the
quad menu, then clicking the object you want
toselect. InanActiveShadeviewport,onlyone
object at a time can be selected.
Tip: When an object in an Act iveShade window h as
a mapped m aterial, select it b efore you change a
map or adjust its parameters.
What ActiveShade Does and Doesn’t Do
For the sake of interactivity, the ActiveShade
windowislimitedinwhatitwillandwon’tupdate
interactively. An ActiveShade rendering is not
necessarily the same, and in general is less precise,
than a final production rendering.
Tip: Whenyouchangegeometrybytransforming
it or modifying it, right-click the ActiveShade
windowandchooseTools>Initializefromthe
quad menu (lower-right quadrant). This updates
the Act iveShade rendering.
•Movinganobjectdoesnotupdatethe
ActiveShade window .
• Applying a modifier or otherwise changing
object geometry does not interactively update
the ActiveShade window.
• Reflections are rendered only in the Initialize
pass.
• Ma terials ar e displayed as RGBA data with 8
bits per channel.
• Multiple changes to a material might lead to
deteriorationinimagequality.
If you see this happening, right-click the
Ac tiveShade window and choose To ols >
Initialize from the quad menu (lower-right
quadrant).
• Masks are reduced from 8x8 to 4x4 subdivisions
per pixel. The mask is corrected to 6-bit opacity
(0 to 63 rather than 0 to 255). This might result
in some visual noise around object edges.