Make sure that what you see in Perspective view is exactly what
you want to be rendered, then right click on the render icon (), and
select one of the following:

Monochrome wireframe display:

     A simple wireframe render, good for previews. Pretty
     much just what you see in the editor.

Wireframe Display:

     Same as above, but with colours.

Monochrome Shaded Display:

     Greyscale solid render, quite good for quick test renders
     of animations.

Shaded Display:

     As above, but with colour.

Scanline:

     The least processor intensive of the two raytracing modes,
     you dont get shadows, refraction and many other things in
     this mode. Its excellent for viewing work in progress, and
     for some simple scenes it may be all you need. 

Raytracing:

     This is the best image quality you can get. Each ray of light
     is traced from the source, onto the objects, hence the name.
     It is MUCH more processor intensive though, and with complicated
     scenes you might be tearing your hair out waiting to get anywhere.
     Good for final renders.


Render Options window:



     General:

          Pict.Sequ.

               This option is for animation, we'll leave this bit until
               later.

          Resolution
               
               The size in pixels of the finished render. You can
               choose between the standard VGA modes, or pick your
               own custom size. 320x240 recommended for test renders,
               640x480+ for final images.

          Aspect ratio

               Lets you determine the higher/flatter ratio
               in the picture.

          Active object only

               click this if you only want the object that is actually
               selected to be rendered. Good if you want to check
               work in progress clearly without other things getting
               in the way.

          Path

               Where you want to save the render

          Object Map

               Come to this later :)

          Depth map

               As above

          Format

               The image format you want to save the picture in. Iffs are 
               amiga friendly and interchangeable, but 24 bit IFFS are HUGE!
               IFF Comp is a compressed version, taking up slightly less room.
               Same with TIFF and TIFF comp. BMPs are awful windows files,      
               steer clear unless you really need to use your image on a
               horrid old machine :) Finally, Jpeg (o),(-), and (+) give
               you varying qualitys of JPEG image. (-) being the worst and 
               (+) being the best. Jpegs are best for space saving.

          
     Wire/Surf.


          This page gives you some options on the Wire/surface tracing
          modes, most of which are pretty self explanatory.

     Raytracing.



          Transparency 

               Choose between none, refractive and non-refractive. Refraction
               is 'bending' of light, so if you have textures which use
               refraction, you're better having the Refraction on. Otherwise,
               with just plain transparent textures, you can turn it off.
               If you use no transparent textures at all, you can set it to
               none. The result is a quicker render.

          Reflection

               here you can choose whether reflection is on, off, or whether
               the only reflections are from the ground and sky.

          Shadow

               Turns shadows on

          Fresnel

               Pass. Wierd german word, I have no idea what this option does :)
               Anyone got any ideas?

          Voxel, ray depth, Shadow Depth,  and thresh value

               Usually you can just leave these alone, although
               when you become more experienced you might want to
               change these to give you a more realistic render.

          Smooth/textures/relief/blur/lense effects

               Check which of the above you want to be activated. For test
               renders you may want to turn textures off, and turn smooth
               objects off, which results in a quicker render.

          Antialiasing:

               This is a very important part of final renders. When you
               render an image, you might notice jagged edges and pixelisation
               on diagonal lines in the picture. Which isnt exactly the most
               attractive thing you can have. Setting the antialiasing value
               higher than one makes Cinema4d try to eliminate all these jagged
               edges by blending in the colours of these edges with the background.
               However, it does make rendering much slower, so dont go overboard here.
               You dont need to use antialiasing if all you want to do is 
               have a quick peek at your work in progress. Otherwise, in a 
               final render, a value of 3 is quite good.

               Below the text field, you can also specify what level
               of antialiasing you want. 'Always' tries to smooth
               in all of the edges in the picture, 'At texture',
               'at edge' and 'at colour change' can be checked or
               unchecked to make the quality better, or make the quality
               less but the render faster.

     Misc:



          Picture control of other programs:

               You can type a command in this field, and it will
               be executed once the render is finished. This might
               be good if you want an alarm to tell you when the render
               has been completed.

          Multitasking

               If you turn multitasking off, cinema4d will hog the entire
               system to squeeze every bit or processor power from your amiga.
               It does result in a slightly faster render, but most likely you
               wont be able to abort the render, because this will stop the
               mouse pointer from moving.

          Disable picture

               Will turn the display on the amiga off, which means that the     
               processor will have less pixels to cope with, resulting
               in a little bit free cpu time. Not much, but might be good
               if you're going to make a coffee or something and arent interested
               in how much progress has been made.

          Filter

               Lets you add an image processing filter to the final image.
               Really just a quick thing to save you having to load the
               final pic into Photogenics or whatever, to do it.
               
     Pict. Mode



          here you can choose a screenmode for the render. Note that this isnt
          the screenmode of the final render, but actually just the mode
          of the external screen that displays the render while its being
          calculated. Good if you're doing a quick test render, and want
          to see whats being drawn while its being rendered, but I wouldnt
          recommend it for final renders. You should select 'no display',
          which speeds up the calculation considerably.

back