MAX Default Scanline A-Buffer Rollout

Mapping—Clear to ignore all mapping information to speed up rendering for tests. Affects automatic reflections and environment maps as well as material mapping.

Shadows—Clear to turn off rendering of cast shadows to speed up rendering for tests.

Auto Reflect/Refract and Mirrors—Ignores automatic reflection/refraction maps to speed up rendering for tests.

Force Wireframe—Set to render all surfaces in the scene as wireframes. You can choose the thickness of the wireframe in pixels. Default=1.

Enable SSE—When on, rendering uses Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE). (SIMD stands for Single Instruction, Multiple Data.) Depending on the CPU (or CPUs) of your system, SSE can improve render time. Default=off.

Anti-Aliasing—Antialiasing smoothes the jagged edges that occur along the edges of diagonal and curves lines when rendering. Turn off only when you are rendering test images and greater speed is more important than image quality.

Turning off Anti-Aliasing disables the Force Wireframe setting. Geometry renders according to the material assigned it even if Force Wireframe is turned on.

Filter Maps—Turns on or off the filtering of mapped materials. Leave on unless you are making test renderings and want to speed up rendering time and save memory.

Filter—Allows you to select a high-quality table-based filter from the drop down list to apply to your rendering. Filters are the last step in antialiasing. They work at the sub-pixel level and allow you to sharpen or soften your final output, depending on which filter you select. Below the drop-down list is a small description of the filter and how it is applied to your image.

Tip: Render Region and Render Selected give reliable results only when rendered with the Area filter.

Tip: Filter Size—Allows you to increase or decrease the amount of blur applied to an image. This option is available only when a Soften filter has been selected from the drop-down list. The spinner is grayed out when any other filter has been selected.

Area—Computes antialiasing using a variable-size area filter. This is the original 3ds max filter.

Blackman—A 25-pixel filter that is sharp, but without edge enhancement.

Blend—A blend between sharp area and Gaussian soften filters.

Plate Match/MAX R2.5—Uses the 3ds max 2.5 method (no map filtering) to match camera and screen maps or matte/shadow elements to an unfiltered background image.

In earlier versions of the software, the antialiasing affected only geometric edges, with the filtering of bitmaps being controlled in the Bitmap Map parameters (pyramidal, summed area, or no filtering). Current antialiasing filters affect every aspect of the object, filtering textures along with geometric edges.

While the software’s antialiasing provides superior results, this method also produces inconsistencies when rendering objects that are supposed to match the environment background, because the antialiasing filters do not affect the background by default (FilterBackground=0 in [Renderer] section of the 3dsmax.ini file or Customize menu > Preferences > Rendering tab > Background group > Filter Background). In order to correctly match an object’s map to an unfiltered background image, you need to use the Plate Match/MAX R2.5 filter so the texture is not affected by the antialiasing.

There are three ways you can render objects to blend seamlessly into a background environment:

Catmull-Rom—A 25-pixel reconstruction filter with a slight edge-enhancement effect.

Cook Variable—A general-purpose filter. Values of 1 to 2.5 are sharp; higher values blur the image.

Cubic—A 25-pixel blurring filter based on a cubic spline.

Mitchell-Netravali—Two-parameter filter; a trade-off of blurring, ringing, and anisotropy. If the ringing value is set higher than .5 it will impact the alpha channel of the image.

Quadratic—A 9-pixel blurring filter based on a quadratic spline.

Sharp Quadratic—A sharp nine-pixel reconstruction filter from Nelson Max.

Soften—An adjustable Gaussian softening filter for mild blurring.

Video—A 25-pixel blurring filter optimized for NTSC and PAL video applications.

Filter Size—Allows you to increase or decrease the amount of blur applied to an image. This option is available only for certain filters.

Setting the Filter Size to 1.0 effectively disables the filter.

Note: Some filters show additional, filter-specific parameters below the Filter Size control.

When you render separate elements, you can explicitly enable or disable the active filter, on a per-element basis.

Disable all Samplers—Disables all SuperSampling.

Color Range Limiting allows you handle over-brightness by toggling between either Clamping or Scaling color components (RGB) that are out of range (0 to 1). Typically, specular highlights can cause color components to rise above range while using filters with negative lobes can cause color components to be below range. You choose one of two options to control how the renderer handles out of range color components.

Clamp—To keep all color components in range Clamp will change any color with a value greater than 1 down to 1 while any color below 0 will be clamped at 0. Any value between 0 and 1 will not change. Very bright colors tend to render as white when using Clamp since hue information can be lost in the process.

Scale—To keep all color components in range Scale will preserve the hue of very bright colors by scaling all three color components so that the maximum component has a value of 1. Be aware that this will change the look of highlights.

You determine which objects have object motion blur applied to them by setting Object in the Motion Blur group of the Properties dialog for that object. Object motion blur blurs the object by creating multiple "time-slice" images of the object for each frame. It takes camera movement into account. Object motion blur is applied during the scanline rendering process.

Apply—Turns object motion blur on or off globally for the entire scene. Any objects that have their Object Motion Blur property set are rendered with motion blur.

Duration—Determines how long the "virtual shutter" is open. When this is set to 1.0, the virtual shutter is open for the entire duration between one frame and the next. Longer values produce more exaggerated effects.

The effect of changing duration.

Samples—Determines how many Duration Subdivision copies are sampled. The maximum setting is 32.

When Samples is less than Duration, random sampling within the duration occurs (which is why there might be a slight granular look to the motion blur). For example, if Duration Subdivision=12 and Samples=8, there are eight random samples out of 12 possible copies within each frame.

When Samples=Duration, there is no randomness (and if both numbers are at their maximum value (32), you get a dense result (which costs between 3–4 times the normal rendering time for that specific object).

If you want to obtain a smooth blur effect, use the maximum settings of 32/32. If you want to cut down rendering time, values of 12/12 will give you much smoother results than 16/12.

Because sampling happens within the duration, the Duration value always has to be less than or equal to Samples.

Duration Subdivisions—Determines how many copies of each object are rendered within the Duration.

Left: Same value for Samples and Subdivisions.

Right: Samples value is less than Subdivisions.

You determine which objects have image motion blur applied to them by setting Image in the Motion Blur group of the Properties dialog for that object. Image motion blur blurs the object by creating a smearing effect rather than multiple images. It takes camera movement into account. Image motion blur is applied after scanline rendering is complete.

The coin on the right has Image Motion Blur applied

You can’t put image motion blur on objects that change their topology.

Tip: When blurred objects overlap, blurring doesn't work correctly and there are gaps in the rendering. Because image motion blur is applied after rendering, it can't account for object overlap. To fix this problem, render each blurred object separately, to a different layer, and then composite the two layers using the Alpha Compositor in Video Post.

Note: Image motion blur doesn't work for NURBS objects that are animated so their tessellation (surface approximation) changes over time. This happens when sub-objects are animated independently of the top-level NURBS model. Nor does image motion blur work on any of the following:

In general, if you have objects with changing topology, use scene or object motion blur rather than image motion blur.

Apply—Turns image motion blur on or off globally for the entire scene. Any objects that have their Image Motion Blur property set are rendered with motion blur.

Duration—Specifies how long the "virtual shutter" is open. When this is set to 1.0, the virtual shutter is open for the entire duration between one frame and the next. The higher the value, the greater the motion blur effect.

Apply to Environment Map—When set, image motion blur is applied to the environment map as well as to the objects in the scene. The effect is noticeable when the camera orbits.

The environment map should use Environment mapping: Spherical, Cylindrical, or Shrink-Wrap. The image motion blur effect doesn't work with Screen-mapped environments.

Work with Transparency—When on, image motion blur works correctly with transparent objects that overlap. Applying image motion blur to transparent objects can increase rendering time. Default=off.

Rendering Iterations—Sets the number of inter-object reflections in non-flat automatic reflection maps. Although increasing this value can sometimes enhance image quality, it also increases rendering time for reflections.

Conserve Memory—When on, rendering uses less memory at a slight cost of memory time. Memory saved is in the range of 15 to 25 percent. The time cost is about four percent. Default=off.