Setting up a scene for rendering requires that you set render options at three different levels: the scene level, the render pass level, and the renderer level. While scene- and pass-level render options are controlled by Softimage, renderer options are controlled by the renderer itself. Softimage allows you to render using the mental ray renderer (this is the default), the Softimage hardware renderer, or an integrated third-party renderer. For more information, see Types of Render Options.
Every geometric object in a scene has a visibility property that controls whether it is visible when rendering, and in particular whether it is visible to various types of rays (primary, secondary, final gathering, and so on).
This visibility property exists locally on every 3D object in Softimage and cannot be applied or deleted. However, visibility can be overriden at the partition level. In the case where your scene contains a lot of objects, setting rendering visibility options can be difficult to manage on a per-object basis. In complex scenes, it's easier to partition objects and use overrides to control rendering visibility for all of the objects in a partition. This process is described in Applying and Overriding Properties on Partitions.
You can set various rendering visibility options from the Visibility Property Editor. The following topics show how rendering visibility can be used in a scene:
Casting and Visibility Options (for transparency, reflection and refraction rays)
Softimage and NVIDIA® mental ray®
Autodesk Softimage uses mental ray as its core rendering engine. mental ray is fully integrated in Softimage, meaning that most mental ray features are exposed in Softimage's user interface, and are easy to adjust — both while creating a scene and during the final renderings. Full integration with mental ray also allows artists to generate final-quality preview renders interactively in 3D views, using the render region.
Rendering and Optimization Tips
If your goal is to find a balance between render quality and speed, see Optimizing a Scene for Rendering for a list of guidelines and methods.
A general rule for calculating memory requirements is to allow 1 MB of memory for every 1000 surface triangles. For every 512 × 512 texture, you need an additional 1 MB of memory.
Info Scene from the Edit panel.
These rules assume that you're using raytracing features (reflection, shadows, refraction, etc.). If you are not using raytracing, you can render much larger scenes with this amount of memory.
