2012

RPREF
Displays or hides the Advanced Render Settings palette for access to advanced
rendering settings.
Material Adjustments
Adding materials to objects greatly increases the realism of a model.
In the context of rendering, materials describe how an object reflects or
transmits light. Within a material, maps can simulate textures, bump effects,
reflections, or refractions.
From the Advanced Render Settings palette, you can turn materials on or off,
turn material filtering on or off, and affect how the surfaces of an object are
rendered.
Materials that you’ve created and attached to objects in the model are normally
turned on when you start the rendering process. If you turn them off, all the
objects in the model assume the characteristics of the GLOBAL material.
Texture Filtering
You can control whether texture filtering, pixel averaging used in anti-aliasing,
occurs when the model is rendered.
When texture filtering is turned on, the renderer uses a pyramidal filtering
methods, which applies filtering as a function of distance.
NOTE Irregular anti-aliasing might occur on detailed texture maps that are applied
to a surface that recedes into the distance.
There is a slight rendering cost when texture filtering is active. Pyramidal
filtering requires memory allocation equal to approximately 133% of the size
of a texture map. Compared to the detail and realism provided by texture
mapped materials, rendering performance is not impacted that much.
When texture filtering is turned off, no anti-aliasing occurs to texture maps
when the renderer processes the model.
2-Sided Rendering
Since you have no control over the direction that faces, normals are pointing,
you may encounter a model that has flipped normals. The back sides of faces
are invisible to the renderer. This means that the face appears to be missing
when viewed from the back. Objects are usually created with the surface
normals facing outward, but it is possible to create objects with the faces
2264 | Chapter 46 Render 3D Objects for Realism