From the course: 3ds Max 2020 Essential Training

Previewing renders with ActiveShade - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2020 Essential Training

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Previewing renders with ActiveShade

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- [Narrator] 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 and that's because they're all interdependent. Before we can even look at lighting we'll need to make a choice. Which renderer will we end up using? We're going to use Arnold in this course and now we're going to set it up to render interactively. When we make changes to our lighting it will update in a interactive production quality mode. On the main tool bar you'll see the render set up button it looks like a little tea pot with a gear. Click on that and up at the top of the render set up window we see the target mode. Each of the target modes are for a different purpose and each can have different settings. The default mode is production rendering mode and that means we're going to render final output to disk or to the screen noninteractively. What we want is active shade mode which is interactive. From that target pull down list choose active shade mode then we'll need to choose the renderer. We'll talk about this more in the chapter on rendering but there are three active shade renderings available. If we click on the renderer pull down ART is for compatibility with other Autodesk applications. The Scanline renderer is the legacy renderer for very simple old school renderings. The Arnold renderer is currently the most advanced, global, illumination renderer available in the stock installation of 3ds Max. Choose Arnold from the renderer pull down and now active shade mode will use the Arnold renderer. Then in the common tab, we just want to set the resolution. Currently we've got the default resolution of 640 by 480. I want a 16 by nine aspect and previously in the course I created a preset here for a 640 by 360 you can click on that if you have it or you can just type in the value of three hundred and sixty in the height field there. Alright, so 640 by 360 is the preview resolution for the active shade window. Now we can set up our options for the render itself. Let's go to the system tab, this is where we can set up the processing options for Arnold and we can control this so that we have a little bit of processing overhead available for other operations in 3ds Max and to do that I want to disable the option labeled Auto detect threads, turn that off and then I can manually set the number of threads or cores that Arnold will use to render in the Activeshade mode. You should know how many cores you have or 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. I want to leave two cores open or two threads open and to do that I can set the threads value to six. I can just type in a six there, but there is a better way to do this actually. Which is to set the threads to a negative value which means Arnold will use all of the cores minus that number. If I want to leave two cores open, I'll set the threads value to negative two and press enter. 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 shaded it is recommended to leave two cores open, otherwise you may have issues with interactivity and 3ds Max. We can go ahead and do a rendering of the prospective view. Close the render set up window and with that perspective view active click on the render button on the main toolbar which is now labeled Activeshade. That takes a second but once it pops up we see an interactive production rendering. Now there are no lights or material in this scene they're just the object or layer colors but now if we change anything in our scene it will update in the Activeshade window. For example; I can navigate in the perspective view using the middle mouse button and that's the pane tool that allows me to truck or pedestal around in the scene. In the Activeshade window updates automatically. There's an even more intuitive way to use Activeshade in 3ds Max 2020. We can load Activeshade directly into a viewport just be aware that size matters. If the viewport resolution is higher then the Activeshade window then the rendering will take longer. Higher resolution will have an adverse effect on interactivity introducing latency when you try to navigate or change scene parameters. I'll close the Activeshade window because Arnold can not update in more than one window or panel at the same time. Then go to the viewport menus, the third item from the left is the shading menu. It currently says, standard. From that menu choose the first item labeled Activeshade using Arnold. Now Activeshade is running interactively in that viewport. If we had lights or cameras in this scene their wire frames would be visible in this Activeshade rendering. Other then that as long as the right most menu reads default shading, you're in a what you see is what you get, situation. The viewport displays an image that is virtually identical to a final production mode rendering that has the same settings in the render set up window and it is fully interactive we can navigate in the scene using the middle mouse or maybe control alt and middle mouse to dolly forward and if we wanted to exit out of active shade just turn it off from the menu switch that off and that's how to choose a renderer for Activeshade and do an interactive production rendering in a floating window or directly in the viewport.

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