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Chapter 1 ✦ Finding Your Way — Exploring the Max Interface
The Particle View interface (keyboard shortcut, 6) lets you control how particles interact
with the scene. Using icons that can be linked into a workflow, you can specify how particles
act with one another and with objects in the scene.
The Track View is covered in Chapter 33, “Working with the Track View,” The Schematic View
interface is covered in Chapter 9, “Working with the Schematic View,” and the Particle View
interface is covered in Chapter 18, “Creating Particles and Particle Flow.”
The Rendering menu
The Rendering menu is the doorway to the final output. The Render command (F10) opens
the Render Scene dialog box where you can set output options such as which frames to ren-
der and the final image size. The Environment command (keyboard shortcut, 8) opens the
Environment dialog box where you can specify the environment settings such as a back-
ground color or image, global lighting settings, and atmospheric effects such as Combustion,
Fog, and Volume Lights.
The Effects command opens the Rendering Effects dialog box. You use the Rendering Effects
dialog box to add rendered effects to an image without having to use the Video Post dialog
box. The Effects categories include options such as Lens Effects, Blur, and Color Balance. The
Advanced Lighting command opens a control panel where the settings for the Light Tracer,
Radiosity, Exposure Control, and Lighting Analysis tools are located.
The Rendering menu holds several features new to 3ds max 6; foremost is the inclusion of
the mental ray rendering engine. Also new to 3ds max 6 are the Panorama Exporter and the
Print Size Wizard.
The Render to Texture command (keyboard shortcut, 0) allows you to render the current
scene as an image to be used as a texture. The Raytracer Settings command opens a dialog
box for enabling raytracing options, and the Raytrace Global Include/Exclude command
opens a dialog box where you can specify which objects are rendered using raytracing and
which are not. The mental ray Message Window opens a window where you can view error
and status messages produced by the mental ray rendering engine.
The ActiveShade Floater opens the ActiveShade window, where you can get immediate ren-
dered results. The ActiveShade Viewport command displays the immediate rendered results
in the active viewport. The Material Editor (keyboard shortcut, M) and Material/Map Browser
commands open their respective dialog boxes for creating, defining, and applying materials.
The Video Post command opens a dialog box for scheduling and controlling any post-
processing work. The dialog box manages events for compositing images and including
special effects such as glows, lens effects, and blurs. The Show Last Rendering command
immediately recalls the last rendered image produced by the Render command.
The Panorama Exporter command allows you to render a panoramic scene. The Print Size
Wizard is a godsend for anyone who is printing images from Max. It relates the current scene
to the common paper sizes that printers use. The RAM Player can display images and anima-
tions in memory and includes two channels for overlaying images and comparing animations
side by side.
New
Feature
Cross-
Reference
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