8
Rendering Your Scene 9
R ender ing Your S cene
Rendering "fills in" geometry with colo r, shadow, l ighting
effects, and so on.
Use the rendering features to define an
environment and to produce the final output from
your scene.
Def inin g E nvir onments a nd
Backgrounds
Rarely do you want to render your scene against the
default background color. Open t he E nvironment
And Effects dialog >
Environment pa nel (page
3–268)
to define a background for your scene, or
to set up effects such as fog.
Setting Rendering Options
To set t he size and qualit y of your final output,
you c an choose from many options on the
Render
Scene dialog (page 3–2)
.Youhavefullcontrol
over professional grade film and video properties
as well as effects such as reflect ion, antialiasing,
shadow properties, and motion blur.
Rendering Images a nd Animation
You render a single image by setting the renderer
to render a single frame of your animation. You
specify what type of image file to produce and
where the program s tores the file.
Rendering an animation is the same as rendering
a si ngle image except that you set the renderer to
render a sequence of frames. You can choose to
render an animation to multiple single frame files
or to popular animation formats such as FLC or
AV I .
See
Render Scene Dialog (page 3–2)
.
The 3ds M ax Window
Most of the main window is occupied by the
vie wports, where you view and work with your
scene. The remaining areas of the window hold
controls and show status information.
One of the most impor t ant aspects of u sing
3ds Max is its versatility. Many program f u nctions
are available from multiple user-interface
elements. For example, you can open Track View
for animation control from the Main toolbar as
well as the Graph Editors menu, but the easiest
way to get to a spe cific object’s track in Track View
is to right-click the object, and then choose Track
View Selected from the quad menu.
You can customize the user interface in a variety
of ways: by adding keyboard shortcuts, moving
toolbars and command panels around, creating
new toolbars and tool buttons, and even recording
scripts into toolbar buttons.
MAXScript lets you create and use custom
commands in the built-in script ing language.
For more information, access the MAXScript
Reference from the Help menu.
Menu Bar
A standard Windows menu bar with typical
File
(page 3–721)
,
Edit (page 3–721)
,and
Help (page
3–732)
menus. Special menus include:
•
Tools (page 3–722)
contains duplicates of many
of the Main toolbar commands.