About this book

About the rendering books

The visual elements of a scene

Viewing nodes and node networks

Creating, duplicating, and deleting nodes

Connecting nodes

Setting node attributes

Animating node attributes

Importing and exporting nodes

Previewing a scene and its elements

Interactively previewing and tuning a scene

Previewing a scene or part of a scene

Previewing how NURBS surfaces will tessellate during rendering

Previewing particles and motion

Previewing surfaces in a modeling view

Previewing visual elements of a scene and their relationships

Finding problems in scenes and making scenes render faster

Creating lights

Properties of lights

Light icons, views, and manipulators

Positioning lights

Directing lights

Controlling which lights illuminate which surfaces

Creating a custom brightness or color decay

Making lights render faster

Shadow

Creating shadows

Properties of shadows

Reusing depth maps

Removing shadows

Controlling which combinations of lights and surfaces produce shadows

Making shadows render faster

Troubleshooting shadows

Optical light effects

Creating optical light effects

Properties of glows

Properties of halos

Properties of lens flares

Optical light effect icons

Removing optical light effects

Illuminated fog

Creating illuminated fog

Properties of illuminated fog

Illuminated fog icons

Removing illuminated fog

NURBS surfaces

Polygonal surfaces

Aliasing

Visual components of materials

Color

Shininess

Bumpiness

Transparency

Self-Illumination

Motion blur

Creating surface materials

Creating materials

Applying textures to materials

Applying materials to surfaces

Combining materials on a surface

Layering materials

Double-sided shading

Switch utilities

Making surfaces render faster

Troubleshooting surfaces

Creating a camera to animate

Camera views and view guides

Camera views

Camera view guides

Camera icons and manipulators

Camera icons

Camera manipulators

Setting up a camera

Setting a camera's view

Setting a camera's center of interest

Setting how a camera views its center of interest

Setting a camera's range

Selectively focusing a camera's view

Saving and loading a camera's view

Making camera views render faster

Creating a color background

Creating a texture background

Creating an image file background

Removing a background

Troubleshooting backgrounds

Atmosphere

Creating environment fog

Properties of environment fog

Troubleshooting environment fog

Setting the properties of rendered images

Setting the file format of rendered images

Setting the file name and extension of rendered images

Setting the resolution and pixel aspect ratio of rendered images

Making rendered images contain color, mask, or depth channels

Setting the location where rendered images are saved

Setting whether rendered images are frames or fields

Selecting objects to render

Selecting layers to render

Selecting individual objects or shadows to render

Selecting a range of objects and shadows to render

Example: Rendering two layers and compositing them

Running MEL commands before and after rendering

Making scenes render faster

Test rendering a scene

Test rendering a single frame

Test rendering an animation

Rendering a frame

Rendering an animation

Rendering an animation on several computers

Rendering a scene on a computer with more than one processor

Rendering particles

Rendering software particles

Rendering hardware particles

Viewing a rendered image of a frame

Viewing rendered images of an animation

Analyzing rendered images

Converting rendered images from one image file format to another

Color correcting rendered images

Troubleshooting rendered images