- [Narrator] Let's prepare for a standard definition
hardware rendering of this simple animation
of a camera arc through this architectural scene.
If you're interested in high-end production rendering
with a global illumination engine,
I recommend that you check out some of our other courses
such as 3ds Max Advanced Lighting,
or 3ds Max Rendering with Arnold.
Global illumination is a deep topic
and there's no time to cover that
in an essential training course.
In this case, I'm going to render a near production quality
image sequence with the Quicksilver Hardware Renderer,
which will demonstrate the general process
of rendering animation in Max.
I'll stop that and actually go to the end
of the animation, and that'll be a good test frame.
The first thing we need to check
is our viewport configuration settings.
There's one very important parameter
that can only be set there; the quality of textures.
Quicksilver is an offline rendering version of Nitrous,
which is the viewport display technology in Max.
The viewport configuration sets a hard limit
on the resolution of rendered textures.
That makes total sense, but the weird part
is that it affects
the Quicksilver offline rendering as well.
The render setup dialogue actually has no control
over texture quality.
That's determined by the Nitrous viewport settings.
To avoid soft or fuzzy textures,
let's go into the Views menu,
to Viewports Configuration.
And in the Display Performance tab,
we have numerical entry fields
to limit the texture resolution.
In this scene, I've got a background which is 8K.
And so, I want to set the Texture Maps value, here,
to 8,192 and press enter.
I'm going to leave the Viewport Background Environment
at its default of 2,048 pixels.
That way, we won't bog down performance in the viewports.
With these settings, Quicksilver will render
the background at full resolution.
But in the viewports, Nitrous will still display
the background at a reduced resolution.
We'll click OK.
Now, let's open the Render Setup dialogue.
The target up here is set to Production Rendering Mode,
and that's what we want.
The renderer defaults to Arnold.
Let's switch that over to the Quicksilver Hardware Renderer.
Previously in the course, in the chapter on cameras,
I talked about the output size of the rendering.
Currently, I've got that set
to a pretty small size of 640 by 360,
which will give us a standard definition rendering,
with an image aspect of 1.778, or 16 by 9.
Now let's configure
the Quicksilver Hardware Renderer options.
Go to the Renderer tab.
Quicksilver is an advanced version of Nitrous,
and so, at the top we see options
to synchronize the two of them.
But, you know what?
In many cases, this isn't really worth bothering with.
The way 3ds Max development evolved over time
resulted in a situation
where it's actually very difficult
to make the viewport and the Quicksilver rendering match.
There are many situations in which this button
to synchronize won't give you a,
what you see is what you get, result.
For example, Quicksilver always uses
the Advanced Lighting rendering level,
and it always uses the Realistic Material shading model.
You actually can't render the so-called standard
or basic materials in Quicksilver.
Even more significantly,
Quicksilver is an iterative renderer,
and we see that, here.
We have iterations.
Nitrous is not an iterative renderer.
So, iterations means that the renderer calculates
many passes, improving quality
with each successive iteration.
Although Nitrous does have
some progressive refinement features,
it only renders a single iteration or pass.
And unless you set the Quicksilver iterations
to an extremely low number, like three,
it's always going to look better than the viewport.
But you don't generally want to set the iterations
to an extremely low value.
The priority should be on getting a good quality rendering,
not on matching the viewport.
So, higher iterations will improve render quality,
up to a point of diminishing returns.
At which point, greater numbers of iterations
won't make any difference.
Every scene is unique, and there's no stock answer
to how many iterations will result
in a certain level of perceived quality.
It depends on many factors, such as the number of lights,
complexity of materials, resolution of the frame,
and even the exact composition
of what objects and illumination are currently visible
within that frame.
For a given number of iterations,
The render time is variable,
depending upon those many factors.
Now, if you want, you can set a total time.
We can switch this over to Time,
and then plug in a time limit in minutes and seconds.
When that time limit is reached,
the rendering for the current frame will stop.
That's helpful because it can tell you
exactly how long it will take
to render a sequence of frames,
but it could result in changes in quality over the course
of the animation.
For a consistent level of quality,
it's safer to stick with setting the number of iterations.
For a near production quality draft render,
I'll set the number of iterations to 512.
And that will work fine in this case
because we're only rendering in standard definition.
If we rendered a higher resolution frame size,
we might need to increase the number of iterations.
Okay, let's test this.
I'm going to render the last frame of my animation.
We see that the physical camera is selected
as the view to render.
We can just click on the big render button.
And it will take a few moments to compile all the materials
and lights, and then start drawing those iterations.
When that's done, we can see
that we still have some work to do.
It's not quite good enough.
And actually, if I rewind back
to frame zero and render that frame,
we'll see this even more dramatically.
When that's done, we see
that we have these big crazy highlights here,
and that's an issue that we will resolve
in the following movie.
We'll explore the Quicksilver render options
for visual style and appearance.