2008

Sunlight
The Sun is modeled as a parallel light source, which makes the incident
direction of sunlight constant over all surfaces in the scene. You can specify
the direction and intensity of the sun directly. Alternatively, the direction
and intensity of the sun can be calculated based on geographical location,
time, and sky condition settings.
See also:
■
Skylight on page 7931
■ Sunlight and Daylight Systems on page 5024
Super Black
Super Black limits the darkness of rendered geometry. This option is used for
video compositing. When compositing, you need pure black for the
background, but overlaying objects need to be less than pure black so that
you can still see exactly where they are. Also, some video systems have
problems with black that has RGB values of 0,0,0, and consider it an "illegal"
color.
Unless you're sure you need it, leave Super Black tuned off in the Render Scene
dialog.
The scanline renderer uses the value of the Super Black preference as a
threshold for the darkness of the rendered scene. For example, if you're
rendering a heavily shadowed object against a black background, although
the background will be rendered as pure black, the deepest shadows on the
object will be no darker than the intensity level specified by the Threshold
spinner (default is 15).
NOTE If the threshold spinner is set too high, it will artificially raise low-blended
values. This can ruin antialiasing effects in the renderer.
Supersampling
Supersampling is one of several antialiasing techniques that the software
performs. Textures, shadows, highlights, and raytraced reflections and
refractions all have their own preliminary antialiasing strategies. Supersampling
7942 | Glossary