You can determine how many triangles are in your scene by selecting Edit > Info Scene from the Edit panel.
After adjusting all of your lights and objects and defining your camera settings, you’re ready to render out your scene. Whether you’re rendering a single frame or hours of animation, rendering a scene is like developing a photograph. The process is often done more than once and you will most likely have to tweak and adjust your options to achieve the look you set out to create.
Your goal may not be just to render, but to optimize rendering quality and speed.
Setting up a scene for rendering requires that you set render options at three different levels: the scene level, the render pass level, and the renderer level. While scene- and pass-level render options are controlled by Softimage, renderer options are controlled by the renderer itself. Softimage allows you to render using the mental ray renderer (this is the default), the Softimage hardware renderer, or an integrated third-party renderer.
Autodesk Softimage uses mental ray as its core rendering engine. mental ray is fully integrated in Softimage, meaning that most mental ray features are exposed in Softimage’s user interface, and are easy to adjust — both while creating a scene and during the final renderings. Full integration with mental ray also allows artists to generate final-quality preview renders interactively in 3D views, using the render region.
Here is a typical sequence of tasks you might follow when rendering. You do not need to follow these tasks strictly in the following order.
1. Set up render passes and define their options.
Render passes let you render different aspects of your scene separately, such as a matte pass, a shadow pass, a highlight pass, or a complete beauty pass. You can define as many render passes as you want: within each pass, you can create partitions of lights and objects, then apply shaders and control their settings together. See Passes & Partitions.
2. Set up render channels and define their options.
You can define render channels that allow you to output different information about the pass to separate files. See Render Channels & Framebuffers for details.
3. Set rendering options.
All objects, including lights and cameras, are defined by their rendering properties. For example, you can determine whether a geometric object is visible, whether its reflection is visible, and whether it casts shadows. Rendering properties can be set for the scene, for the specific renderer, and per pass as well. See Managing Rendering Options and mental ray Renderer Options.
4. Preview the results of any modifications.
The viewports can display your scene in different display modes, including wireframe, hidden-line removal, shaded, and textured.
In addition, you can view any portion of your scene in a viewport and rendered with mental ray by defining a render region. See Previewing Interactively with the Render Region.
You can preview a full frame using Render > Preview. See Previewing a Single Frame.
5. Render the passes.
Softimage gives you the option of rendering using any one of the following methods:
- Interactively from the Render Region, as described in Previewing Interactively with the Render Region.
- Interactively, using the single-frame preview tool, as described in Previewing a Single Frame.
- Interactively from the interface, as described in Rendering to File from the Softimage User Interface.
- Using the [xsi -render | xsibatch -render] command line, as described in Batch Rendering.
- Command-line scripting using the -script option, as described in Batch Rendering with Scripts.
- Using the ray3.exe command line, as described in Ray3.exe Rendering.
- Using mentat ray’s tile-base distributed rendering across several machines. To do so, you must define which machines to use and how. See Distributed Rendering.
6. Composite and apply effects to passes using Softimage Illusion, a fully–integrated compositing and effects toolset, but you are also free to use any other post-production tool.
For more information about Softimage Illusion, see Compositing and Effects.
Rendering and Optimization Tips
If your goal is to find a balance between render quality and speed, see Optimizing a Scene for Rendering for a list of guidelines and methods.
A general rule for calculating memory requirements is to allow 1 MB of memory for every 1000 surface triangles. For every 512 × 512 texture, you need an additional 1 MB of memory.
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You can determine how many triangles are in your scene by selecting Edit > Info Scene from the Edit panel. |
These rules assume that you’re using raytracing features (reflection, shadows, refraction, etc.). If you are not using raytracing, you can render much larger scenes with this amount of memory.
Autodesk Softimage v.7.5