User Manual

Table Of Contents
Renderer Type
This menu lists the available render engines. Fusion provides three: the software renderer,
OpenGL renderer, and the OpenGL UV render engine. Additional renderers can be added via
third-party plug-ins.
All the controls found below this drop-down menu are added by the render engine. They may
change depending on the options available to each renderer. So, each renderer is described in
its own section below.
Software Controls
Output Channels
Besides the usual Red, Green, Blue, and Alpha channels, the software renderer can also embed
the following channels into the image. Enabling additional channels consumes additional
memory and processing time, so these should be used only when required.
RGBA: This option tells the renderer to produce the Red, Green, Blue, and Alpha color
channels of the image. These channels are required, and they cannot be disabled.
Z: This option enables rendering of the Z-channel. The pixels in the Z-channel contain
a value that represents the distance of each pixel from the camera. Note that the
Z-channel values cannot include anti-aliasing. In pixels where multiple depths overlap,
the frontmost depth value is used for this pixel.
Coverage: This option enables rendering of the Coverage channel. The Coverage
channel contains information about which pixels in the Z-buffer provide coverage (are
overlapping with other objects). This helps nodes that use the Z-buffer to provide a
small degree of anti-aliasing. The value of the pixels in this channel indicates, as a
percentage, how much of the pixel is composed of the foreground object.
BgColor: This option enables rendering of the BgColor channel. This channel contains
the color values from objects behind the pixels described in the Coverage channel.
Normal: This option enables rendering of the X, Y, and Z Normals channels. These
three channels contain pixel values that indicate the orientation (direction) of each pixel
in the 3D space. A color channel containing values in a range from [–1,1] represents
each axis.
TexCoord: This option enables rendering of the U and V mapping coordinate channels.
The pixels in these channels contain the texture coordinates of the pixel. Although
texture coordinates are processed internally within the 3D system as three-component
UVW, Fusion images store only UV components. These components are mapped into
the Red and Green color channel.
ObjectID: This option enables rendering of the ObjectID channel. Each object in the 3D
environment can be assigned a numeric identifier when it is created. The pixels in this
floating-point image channel contain the values assigned to the objects that produced
the pixel. Empty pixels have an ID of 0, and the channel supports values as high as
65534. Multiple objects can share a single Object ID. This buffer is useful for extracting
mattes based on the shapes of objects in the scene.
MaterialID: This option enables rendering of the Material ID channel. Each material in
the 3D environment can be assigned a numeric identifier when it is created. The pixels
in this floating-point image channel contain the values assigned to the materials that
produced the pixel. Empty pixels have an ID of 0, and the channel supports values as
high as 65534. Multiple materials can share a single Material ID. This buffer is useful for
extracting mattes based on a texture; for example, a mask containing all the pixels that
comprise a brick texture.
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