3ds max Lighting Previewing renders with ActiveShade The default mode is production rendering mode and that means we're going to render final output to disk or to the screen noninteractively. What we want is active shade mode which is interactive. From that target pull down list choose active shade mode then we'll need to choose the renderer. We'll talk about this more in the chapter on rendering but there are three active shade renderings available. If we click on the renderer pull down ART is for compatibility with other Autodesk applications. The Scanline renderer is the legacy renderer for very simple old school renderings. The Arnold renderer is currently the most advanced, global, illumination renderer available in the stock installation of 3ds Max. Choose Arnold from the renderer pull down and now active shade mode will use the Arnold renderer. Then in the common tab, we just want to set the resolution.
3ds max Lighting Previewing renders with ActiveShade Currently we've got the default resolution of 640 by 480. I want a 16 by nine aspect and previously in the course I created a preset here for a 640 by 360 you can click on that if you have it or you can just type in the value of three hundred and sixty in the height field there. Alright, so 640 by 360 is the preview resolution for the active shade window. Now we can set up our options for the render itself. Let's go to the system tab, this is where we can set up the processing options for Arnold and we can control this so that we have a little bit of processing overhead available for other operations in 3ds Max and to do that I want to disable the option labeled Auto detect threads, turn that off and then I can manually set the number of threads or cores that Arnold will use to render in the Activeshade mode. You should know how many cores you have or specifically how many virtual cores you have on your Windows computer
