Page 675 - Kitab3DsMax

Chapter 23: Rendering a Scene and Enabling Quicksilver

The next five buttons enable the red, green, blue, alpha, and monochrome channels. The alpha channel
holds any transparency information for the image. The alpha channel is a grayscale map, with black show-
ing the transparent areas and white showing the opaque areas. Next to the Display Alpha Channel button is
the Monochrome button, which displays the image as a grayscale image.
The Channel Display drop-down list lets you select the channel to display. The color swatch at the right
shows the color of the currently selected pixel. You can select new pixels by right-clicking and holding on
the image. This temporarily displays a small dialog box with the image dimensions and the RGB value of
the pixel directly under the cursor. The color in the color swatch can then be dragged and dropped in other
dialog boxes such as the Material Editor.
The Toggle UI Overlays button causes the frame that marks the region area to be visible when rendered.
The Toggle UI button hides the top selection of controls in the Rendered Frame Window.

Previewing with ActiveShade
The ActiveShade window gives a quick semi-rendered look at the current scene. You can open an
ActiveShade display within a viewport by clicking the viewport label in the upper-left corner of each view-
port and choosing Views ➪ ActiveShade from the pop-up menu.
Note
The ActiveShade window used to be quite valuable, but now that Max can render lights and shadows in the view-
port, the ActiveShade window isn’t as helpful. n
Only one ActiveShade viewport can be open at a time. If you try to open more than one window, a warning
dialog box lets you know that opening it will close the previous window.

Tip
You can drag materials from the Material Editor and drop them directly on the ActiveShade window. n

Using the RAM Player

Just as you can use the Rendered Frame Window to view and compare rendered images, the RAM Player
enables you to view rendered animations in memory. With animations loaded in memory, you can selec-
tively change the frame rates. Figure 23.10 shows the RAM Player interface, which you open by choosing
Rendering ➪ RAM Player. You see two images of the rendered gingerbread house placed on top of each
other with half of each showing. One was rendered using its default materials and the other was rendered
using Ink ’n’ Paint materials.
The buttons at the top of the RAM Player interface window, shown in Table 23.2, enable you to load an
image to two different channels named A and B. The two Open Channel buttons open a file dialog box
where you can select the file to load. Notice that the image on the right side of the RAM Player is a different
frame from the left side.

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