Choosing How Things Are Displayed in 3D Views

Shows the geometric object made up of its edges, drawn as lines resembling a model made of wire. This image displays all edges without removing hidden parts or filling surfaces.

You can change the wireframe color of individual objects as described in Choosing How to Display Specific Objects.

Reduces all scene objects to simple boxes. This speeds up the redrawing of the scene because fewer details are calculated in the screen refresh.

Applies a fade to visible objects, based on their distance from the camera, in order to convey depth. You can set the depth cue range to the scene, selection, or a custom start and end point. Objects within the range fade as they near the edge of the range, while objects completely outside the range are made invisible. You can also display depth cue fog to give a stronger indication of fading. For more information about the depth cue options, see Camera Display Property Editor [Properties Reference].

Shows only the edges of objects that are facing the camera. Edges that are hidden from view by the surface in front of them are not displayed.

Ignores the orientation of surfaces and instead considers them to be pointing directly toward an infinite light source. All the object's surface triangles are considered to have the same orientation and be the same distance from the light. This results in an object that appears to have no shading.

This mode is useful when you want to concentrate on the silhouettes of objects.

Provides an OpenGL hardware-shaded view of your scene that shows shading, material color, and transparency, but not textures, shadows, reflections, or refraction. By default, selected objects have their wireframes superimposed, making it easy to manipulate points and other components.

Similar to Shaded, but also shows image-based textures (not procedural textures).

This is like the textured, viewing mode, but textures are displayed with constant lighting. The net effect is a general "brightening" of your textures and an absence of shadow. This allows you to see a texture on any part of an object regardless of how well that part is lit.

Tries to approximate the rendered output as closely as possible. This is actually an OpenGL realtime mode that uses MetaSL blocks embedded in shader definitions to emulate the renderer's shaders in realtime.

You can control various options on the High Quality tab of viewports' Camera Display properties, and set defaults in your Display Preferences.

For more information, see Configuring the High Quality View.

Evaluates the real-time shaders that have been applied to objects. In the example shown here, the same textures have been used as for the non-realtime shaders, so the result is similar to the textured mode. Several realtime display modes are available, depending on your graphics card:

• OpenGL: displays realtime shader attributes for objects that have been textured using OpenGL realtime shaders.

• Cg: displays realtime shader attributes for objects that have been textured using Cg realtime shaders as well as Softimage's Cg-compatible MetaShaders.

• DirectX: displays realtime shader attributes for objects that have been textured using DirectX realtime shaders.

For more information, see Realtime Shader Basics [Realtime Shaders].