8

22 Chapter 17: Rendering
Mater ial Editor —
Displays the Material Editor (page
2–1253)
.
Tools q uadrant (lower right)
ThesearethecommandsthatperformActiveShade
operations.
Draw Region—When on, lets you draw a
rectangular region of the ActiveShade window.
While it is active, only the region is updated by
interactive reshading. T his can save time, and also
help you concentrate on just a portion of the image
to be rendered. Default=off.
To turn off Draw Region, click outside the
rectangular region. The entire ActiveShade
window is updatable again.
Initialize—Initializes the ActiveShade window. To
keep the ActiveShade window current, you need to
choose Initialize after transforming, modifying , or
otherwise changing geometry. If you have turned
off A utomatic Reinitialization, you also need
to choose Initialize after you update a mapped
mater ial.
Rendering can be slow. The initialize pass is meant
to take care of the most time-consuming portions
of rendering, to allow the update pass to take place
as quickly as possible. Initialization includes the
following steps:
• Evaluate the scene geometry into meshes.
•Applyspacewarps.
• Do transformations and clipping.
• Evaluate textures and shade materials.
• Perform optimizations to speed later
processing, such as merging fragments from
the same surface that are in the same pixel.
The result of initialization is a buffer. This is a
compressed rendering that, like a
G-Buffer (page
3–1040)
,containstherenderingplusadditional
information used by the second step, updating.
During the initialize pass, progress is indicated by
a row of pixels (white by default) that traverses the
top edge of the ActiveShade window.
Update—Updates the ActiveShade window.
Updating shading takes the buffer created by the
first pass, initializ ation, and uses information in
that buffer to change the color of pixels when you
make changes to lights and materials in the scene.
During the update pass, progress is indicated by a
row of pixels (white by default) that descends the
right edge of the ActiveShade w indow.
To keep the ActiveShade window current, you need
to choose Update Shading if you hav e previously
turned off Automatic Shading U pdate.
Select Object—(Viewports only.) When on, you
canselectanobjectintheActiveShadewindowby
clicking.Youcanselectonlyoneobjectatatime.
WhenanobjectsisselectedintheActiveShade
w indow, the Initialize pass resamples textures for
that object alone. This improves the window’s
rendering speed, and is useful when you are
adjusting texture display.
Toggle Toolbar—(Viewports only.) Toggles display
of the ActiveShade window toolbar in viewports.
Keyboard shortcut: SPACEBAR
The Keyboard Shortcut Override Toggle
(page 3–912)
must be on for the spacebar to toggle
the ActiveShade toolbar.
Options quadrant (lower left)
These commands control how the ActiveShade
window behaves.
Act Only On M ouse U p—When on, changes you
make to lig ht and material parameters (for
example, the RGB or M ultiplier spinners) update
the ActiveShade window only after you release the
mouse. When off, changes to these parameters