9

Rendering Your Scene 9
R ender ing Your Scene
Rendering "fi lls in" geometry with color, shadow, lighting
effects, and so on.
Use the rendering features to define an
environment and to produce the final output from
your scene.
Def inin g Env ir onments and
Backgrounds
Rarely do you want to render your scene against the
default background color. O p en the Environment
And Effects dialog > Environment panel (page
3–272) to define a background for your scene, or
to set up effects such as fog.
Setting Rendering Options
To set the size and qualit y of your final output,
you can choose from many options on the Render
Scene dialog (page 3–2).Youhavefullcontrol
over professional grade film and video properties
as well as effects such as reflection, antialiasing,
shadow properties, and motion blur .
Rendering Images and Animation
You render a single image by setting the renderer
to render a sing le frame of your animation. You
specify what type of image file to produce and
where the program stores the file.
Rendering an animation is the same as rendering
a single image except that you set the renderer to
render a sequence of frames. You can choose to
render an animation to multiple sing le frame fi les
or to popular animation formats such as AVI or
MOV.
See Render Scene Dialog ( page 3–2).
The 3 ds M ax W indow
Most of the main window is occupied by the
vie wports, where you view and work with your
scene. The remaining areas of the window hold
controls and show status information.
One of the most important aspects of using
3ds Max is its versatilit y. Many program fu nc tions
are available from multiple user-interface
elements. For example, you can open Track View
for anima tion control from the Main toolbar as
well as the Graph Editors menu, but the easiest
way to get to a specific object’s track in Track View
is to right-click the object, and then choose Track
View Selected f rom the quad menu.
You can customize the user interface in a variety
of ways: by adding keyboard shortcuts, moving
toolbars and command panels around, creating
new toolbars and tool buttons, and even recording
scripts into toolbar buttons.
MAXScript lets you create and use custom
commands in the built-in scripting language.
For more information, access the MAXScript
Reference from the Help menu.
Menu Bar
AstandardWindowsmenubarwithtypicalFile
(page 3–673), Edit (page 3–673),andHelp (page
3–684) menus. Special menus include:
• Tools (page 3–674) contains duplicates of many
of the Main toolbar commands.