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22 Chapter 17: Rendering
The view port reverts to the view it previously
showed.
• If the toolbar is not visible, press the
Spacebar
to display it, then right-click the toolbar and
choose t he kind of v iew to display.
ActiveShade Commands (Quad
Menu)
When you right-click an ActiveShade window, the
lower-left quadrant of the quad menu displays a
set of commands for ActiveShade (page 3–17).
Inter face
Render quadrant (upper right)
Thesearegeneral-purposecommands.
Show Last Rendering—Displays the last rendering
in a rendered frame window (page 3–5).Not
available if no rendering has been made during
this session.
Render—Displays the Render Scene dialog (page
3–2).WhenyouusetheActiveShadequad
menu, initially Render Scene is set to render the
ActiveShade window.
Render Last—Repeats the last render, using the last
view port f rom w hich you rendered.
Mater ial/Map B rowser—Displays a m odeless
Material/Map Browser (page 2–1447).
Material Editor—Displays the Material Editor (page
2–1409).
Tools quadrant (lower right)
These are the commands that perform ActiveShade
operations.
Draw R egion—When on, lets you draw a
rectangular region of the ActiveShade window.
While it is ac tive, only the region is updated by
interactive reshading. This can save time, and als o
help you concentrate on just a portion of the image
to be rendered. Default=off.
To turn off Draw Region, click outside the
rectangularregion. TheentireActiveShade
window is updatable again.
Initialize—Initializes the ActiveShade window. To
keep the ActiveShade w i ndow current, you need to
choose Initialize after transforming, modifying, or
other wise changing geometry. If you have turned
off Automatic Reinitialization, you also need
to choose Initialize after you update a mapped
material.
Rendering can be slow. The initialize pass is meant
to take care of the most time-consuming portions
of rendering, to allow the update pass to take place
as quickly as possible. Initialization includes the
following steps:
• Evaluate the scene geometry into meshes.
• Apply space warps.
• Do transformations and clipping.
• Evaluate textures and shade materials.
• Perform optimizations to speed later
processing, such as merging fragments from
thesamesurfacethatareinthesamepixel.
The result of initialization is a buffer. This is a
compressed rendering that, like a G-Buffer (page
3–946), contains the rendering plus additional
information u sed by t he second step, updating.