2008

TIP When you change geometry by transforming it or modifying it, right-click
the ActiveShade window and choose Tools > Initialize from the quad menu
(lower-right quadrant). This updates the ActiveShade rendering.
■ Moving an object does not update the 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.
■ Materials are displayed as RGBA data with 8 bits per channel.
■ Multiple changes to a material might lead to deterioration in image quality.
If you see this happening, right-click the ActiveShade window and choose
Tools > 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.
■ Because of the preceding item, filters are coarser than in full-scale
renderings, but they still have significant subpixel information.
■ There is a limitation of 16 subdivisions per pixel. Because of this, any
objects behind the sixteenth occluding object for a given pixel will be
ignored. Rendered back faces count as separate objects.
■ Reshading uses compressed normals and other direction vectors. This
should have no visible effect.
■ ActiveShade does not render atmospheric effects, rendering effects, or
ray-traced shadows (the only shadows it can render are shadow-mapped
shadows).
Procedures
To display an ActiveShade window in a viewport:
■ Right-click the viewport label, choose Views, and then ActiveShade.
NOTE You can't make a maximized viewport an ActiveShade window,
or maximize an ActiveShade window.
5914 | Chapter 18 Rendering