Rendering to Textures: General Settings Rollout

These controls select which objects to bake. See Render To Textures dialog for procedures.

Selected Objects—(The default.) Renders textures for the selected objects only.

All Prepared Objects—Renders textures for all objects that have texture baking set up.

On—When on, applies an “Automatic Flatten UVs” (Unwrap UVW) modifier to the objects whose texture is being rendered. Default=on.

The remaining controls are options for how to flatten UVs. These are the same controls provided by the Unwrap UVW modifier's Flatten Mapping dialog:

Threshold Angle—The angle used to determine the face clusters to be mapped. Default=45.0

As faces are gathered to be mapped, the modifier uses this parameter to determine which faces get put in a cluster. This is the maximum angle that can exist between faces in a cluster.

The higher this number, the larger the clusters will be, with consequently greater distortion introduced as a result of texture faces' proportions deviating from their geometry-equivalent faces.

Spacing—Controls the amount of space between clusters. Default=0.03.

The higher this setting, the the larger the gap that appears between clusters.

Rotate Clusters—Controls whether clusters are rotated to minimize the size of their bounding box. For instance, the bounding box of a rectangle rotated 45 degrees occupies more area than one rotated 90 degrees. Default=on.

Fill Holes—When turned on, smaller clusters will be placed in empty spaces within larger clusters to take the most advantage of the available mapping space. Default=on.

Clear Unwrappers—Clears the unwrap modifiers from the stack.

These controls let you choose whether to use draft or production rendering settings. (Disregarding the bitmap size settings, which are overridden by the Render To Texture dialog.) Default=Production.

Important: To successfully render a texture, you must use the default scanline renderer.

Production—Uses the current production rendering settings.

Draft—Uses the current draft rendering settings.

Setup—Displays the Render Scene dialog, where you can adjust production settings, draft settings, or both.

Create Baked Materials—When on, bakes the material onto the rendered objects. When off, the material is saved to disk, but not baked. Default=on.

Show Baked in Viewport—When on, displays the baked material in shaded viewports, after rendering. When off, shaded viewports do not change. Default=on.

This control is disabled if Create Baked Materials is turned off.

Display Frame Buffer—When on, displays elements in a virtual frame buffer as they are rendered. When off, does not display the virtual frame buffer. Default=on.

This control is disabled if Create Baked Materials is turned off.

Clear Shell Materials—Clears the material assignments (both base material and baked material) from the Shell material applied to the texture-baked object.

Rendering to textures can choose a map size for you. Automatic map sizing is enabled or disabled by a toggle in the Selected Object Settings rollout. The controls in this group specify how to create the map, when Automatic Map Size is enabled. Automatic map sizing computes the total surface area of all objects in the selection, then multiplies that value by Scale, and creates a square texture map of those dimensions.

Scale—The amount by which to scale the total surface area of generated texture. Default=0.01.

Nearest power of 2—When on, rounds the map dimensions (length and width) to the nearest power of 2. Default=off.

Min—The minimum size, in pixels, of the length and width of the automatically sized map. Default=32.

Max—The maximum size, in pixels, of the length and width of the automatically sized map. Default=2048.

Text field—Specifies the folder where the rendered texture will be saved. You can enter a different folder name in this field. Default=the \images subfolder of the folder where you installed 3ds max.

...—Click this button to display a dialog that lets you browse to the directory where you want the rendered texture to be saved.