From the course: 3ds Max 2019 Essential Training

Previewing renders with ActiveShade - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2019 Essential Training

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Previewing renders with ActiveShade

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- [Instructor] In this chapter, we'll get an introduction to lighting in 3ds Max. Lighting is inextricably linked with materials and rendering. If you change one of those you will probably need to change the others they're all interdependent. So before we can even look at lighting, we'll need to make a choice as far as which renderer we're going to end up using. And we're going to be using Arnold in this course, and that's what we're going to do now, we're going to set up Arnold, the renderer, to render interactively, so that when we make changes to our lighting setup, it will render in real time in a production quality mode. So let's set that up. Go into the main tool bar, we have the render setup button, looks like a teapot with a little gear on it. Click on that. And up at the top of the render set up window, we have the target mode. And the default is production rendering mode. That means that we're going to render to disk or to the screen. What we want is an active shade mode which is interactive. So from that target pull down list, choose active shade mode, and then we get to choose the renderer. And we'll talk about this more in the chapter on rendering, but there are three active shade renderers available. ART is for compatibility with other auto disk applications. Scan line renderer is for very simple old school renderings. It's the legacy renderer in 3ds Max. And Arnold is the currently most advanced, global illumination renderer available, in the stock installation of 3ds Max. So we're going to be using Arnold. Choose Arnold from the renderer pull down. In the common tab we want to have a resolution of 640 by 360. I made a preset earlier in the course, so I can just click on that, or you can type in the height value here, and we have 640 by 360 as our preview resolution for the interactive active shade rendering. Then go into this system tab, the system tab controls the processor usage for Arnold, and so that I can have a little bit of processing overhead for other operations in 3ds Max, I want to disable auto detect threads, and reduce the number of total threads or cores, so that I leave some cores open for other operations, such as moving objects around and so on. So you should know how many cores you have, or more specifically how many virtual cores you have on your Windows computer, I've got a quad core processor with hyper threading enabled for eight virtual cores, so if I want to leave two cores open, I could set the threads value to six. But a better way to do it is actually to set the threads to a negative value, which means Arnold will use all but that number of cores. So I'll set this to negative two, leaving two cores open. Now of course if you have a different number of cores on your machine, you might want to set these values differently, but for active shade it is recommended to leave to cores open, so I'll press enter, and we can go ahead and do a render in the perspective view with that perspective view selected, click the render button, and the active shade render appears, and we see an interactive production rendering. There are no lights or materials in this scene, these are just the object or layer colors. But now we are set up so that when we add lights to our scene we'll be able to see that in real time. So that's how to choose a renderer and set up the active shade window.

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