Sets preferences for rendering.
The Rendering preferences panel contains the following options:
Some pixel colors are beyond the safe NTSC or PAL threshold. You can choose to flag them or modify them to acceptable values.
Flag with Black: Flags all illegal pixels with black to show you how illegal your image is. This mode can teach you how to make correct colors, instead of depending on one of the Scale options. The scale options force a natural discontinuity in the color values. In some cases, that discontinuity can cause visible aliasing.
Scale Luma: Scales the luminance to bring the color into range, and maintains saturation. This generally makes the illegal areas appear darker than they should be.
Scale Saturation: Scales the chroma to bring the color into range, and maintains saturation. Because it keeps the brightness of the pixels fairly equivalent to the unscaled ones, this is the more useful of the two scale methods.
NTSC/PAL: Determines the standard to use for the video color check.
Sets output dithering for all file types.
True Color: Turns dithering on or off for any truecolor output device. For 24-bit work, Dither True Color should be on. For paletted work, it can be off.
Paletted: Turns dithering on or off for any 8-bit paletted device.
Odd/Even: Sets which set of scanlines are rendered to the first field. Some devices require this set to even. Some require it set to odd. Determine the correct setting for your system. If you are rendering to fields and having problems with incorrectly strobing video images, try changing this parameter.
Threshold: Keeps the super black threshold above a certain level (primarily for luminance keying).
Angle Separation: Locks the spotlight hotspot and falloff cones at the angle separation defined by the spinner (degrees). This option constrains the hotspot angle so that it can’t equal the falloff (and cause aliasing artifacts).
Ensures that the edges of rendered geometry are not antialiased against the background. The inside of the geometry is still antialiased. Clear this option unless you’re creating sprites for game development, or require special compositing techniques. In these cases, selecting this option helps avoid generating alpha antialiasing on the outlines of the geometry.
Click the color swatch to change the default ambient light color for renderings. This color will be the darkest color for rendered shadows in the scene.
Allows you to increase the Pixel Size to between 1.5-2.0 for extra-smooth antialiasing. This is needed for high-resolution video and film animation for scenes that have many long, high-contrast, nearly-vertical, or nearly-horizontal lines. In these cases, setting this value to 2.0 smoothes out the long edges. Test to make sure you don't create artifacts by this method, especially against a black background.
Nth Serial Numbering: Specifies whether output frame files generated using a frame-step value other than 1 are numbered sequentially (selected) or according to their true frame numbers (clear).
Beep: Beeps to let you know that the rendering has finished. You can set the frequency and the duration.
Play Sound: Plays a sound file to let you know that the rendering has finished. To select a sound file, click the Choose Sound button. You can test sound files with the Play button in the file browser dialog. Press Esc to turn off the sound.
Specifies the renderers for the Production side and the Draft side. Switch between the two renderers using the Production and Draft options in the Render Scene dialog.
Assign: Displays a dialog listing all renderer plug-ins installed in your system. Select a new one to replace the current one.
On: Causes 3D Studio MAX to treat the rendering task as separate threads. This option works with multiprocessor systems. When clear, 3D Studio MAX treats a rendering task as a single chunk of processing and won't divide it up. Each processor in your computer handles a different thread, which makes full use of available processing power and speeds up rendering to the maximum.