Settings

Settings contain advanced controls for Tone Mapping, White Balance, Camera Lens Types, Custom MDL Paths, and alternating Lighting Environments. This menu also provides controls for customizing hardware resources. These options can be found in the Render Setup > Settings tab.

The tone mapper allows various controls over the look of your scene. These can be used during rendering without interrupting progress. These can be found in Render Setup > Settings tab, under the Tone Mapper rollout

• Enable Tone Mapping: Make interactive visual adjustments to the Iray rendering output.
• Exposure Value: Affects the overall exposure of your scene, positive numbers underexpose, negative numbers overrexpose.
• Highlight Recovery: Controls the compression of the highlights in the image. The higher the value the more the highlights will be compressed, with 0.0 giving no compression.
• Shadows: Increases the darkness of shadows
• Saturation: Increases or decreases the overall color in your scene
• White Balance:
  • Predominant Lighting: Provides preset color temperatures based on various light types
    • Full Spectrum
    • D50 (Horizon light) 5003k
    • D55 (Mid morning/afternoon daylight) 5503k
    • D65 (Noon daylight) 6504k
    • D75 (North sky daylight) 7504k
    • F1 (Daylight Fluorescent) 6430k
    • F2 (cool white fluorescent) 4230k
    • F3 (White Fluorescent) 3450k
    • F4 (warm white fluorescent) 2940k
    • F5 (Daylight fluorescent) 6350k
    • F6 (lite white fluorescent) 4150k
    • A (Incandescent/Tungsten) 2856k
    • Phosphor Mercury 6800k
    • Xenon 6400k
    • Mercury 4000k
    • Quartz 3350k
    • Halogen 3000k
    • High pressure sodium 2200k
  • Custom (Kelvin): Give custom control over the Kelvin value.

Environment Lighting

The Active Environment drop down provides information on which environment in your scene is currently lighting the scene. Iray only allows one environment be active at a time.

• None: Iray will not use any environment in your scene
• Select button: will select this environment in 3ds Max allowing you quicker access to transform or edit its parameters

Camera

The camera rollout provides settings for traditional cameras (Planar), 360 degree panoramic cameras (Spherical), and other panoramic cameras (Cylindrical). When enabled, there are additional output controls for left and right eye stereo rendering. Default settings having no effect on the Iray rendering output.

Lens Type: Select lens type: Planar, Spherical, or Cylindrical

• Planar: The planar (default) lens type and makes the rendering unchanged from previous versions of Iray.
• Spherical: The spherical (360 degrees) lens type captures 180 degrees vertically (zenith to nadir) and a full 360 degrees horizontally, ignoring the viewport camera FOV settings. The resulting image is a lat/long spherical rendering.


✱  Note: This can be used to create spherical environments for image based lighting. For best results, try rendering square pixels at a 2:1 ratio (e.g. 1024 x 512, 4096 x 2048, etc.).


• Cylindrical: This lens creates a cylindrical panoramic image. It uses the vertical FOV of the viewport camera while the horizontal FOV becomes a full 360 degrees. This is similar to photographing and seamlessly stitching together a series of consecutive images while horizontally rotating the camera around its panoramic pivot point.


✱  Note: For best results with Spherical and Cylindrical lens types, use a camera parallel to the ground with no pitch or roll.

Stereo Output:

• On: This enables controls for customizing stereo output.
  • Left Eye: Select Left Eye to render with stereo offset based on Eye Separation and Focal Distance.
  • Right Eye: Select Right Eye to render with stereo offset based on Eye Separation and Focal Distance.
  • Both Eyes (Combined Image): Select to render both Left Eye and Right Eye with stereo offset based on Eye Separation and Focal Distance.
    • Left/Right: Select to render both eyes simultaneously side by side.
    • Above/Below: Select to render both eyes simultaneously above and below.
  
  
  ✱  Note: When using Both Eyes (Combined Image), it is necessary to set the entire 3ds Max Output Size. For best results when setting up for VR ready output, use Above/Below, and try rendering square pixels at a 1:1 ratio (e.g. 1024 x 1024, 4096 x 4096, etc.).
  
  
  • Eye Seperation: This value sets the distance between the left and right eyes. Also known as inter-axial separation, this defaults to 6 cm (2.362 inches). Disable the Use Default checkbox to modify this value.
  
  
  ✱  Note: The Eye Separation value has an effect on the perception of stereo depth. Larger values increase stereo parallax, and make the scene scale feel smaller and stereo effect more noticeable. Conversely, smaller Eye Separation values make the perceived scene scale larger and the stereo effect more subtle. VR device manufacturers may specify the recommended Eye Separation distance.
  
  
  • Focal Distance: This value sets the distance at which the stereo effect has zero parallax. Objects closer than this distance have positive parallax and appear to be projecting out of the screen. Objects beyond this distance have negative parallax and appear to recede into the screen. Disable the option “Use camera target distance” to modify this value.
  • Use camera target distance: Enabled by default. When enabled, Focal Distance will be the Target Distance of the viewport camera.

Bloom Filter

Provides a post-process filter to approximate bloom/glare effects. The can be used to produce subtle bloom and glare effects, such as adding slight halos to emissive objects.

• Enable: Enable bloom filter.
• Size: Affects the size of bloom effects, specified as a fraction of the output resolution.
• Threshold: Sets the luminance threshold above which bloom effects will appear. When the tone mapper is enabled, this acts as a relative scale such that the 0 — 1 range maps to the black — white brightness range of the image. When the tone mapper is disabled, this instead acts as an absolute luminance scale in cd/m².
  The default value of 0.9 will only affect the brightest parts of the image when the tone mapper is enabled, and is also appropriate for un-tone mapped scenes lit with standard Max lights. For un-tone mapped scenes lit with photometric lights, values up to 100 may be required, whilst for scenes using an Iray+ physical sky values over 50000 may be appropriate. Note that even with the tone mapper enabled, it may be desirable to set values greater than 1.0 if bright lights are visible in the scene.
• Strength: Increase or descreases the strength of the bloom effect.

Network Render

Access the Network Render dialog for remote offline rendering, see Remote Rendering for more details.

Resources

Gives options over local and remote rendering, see Remote Rendering for more details.

Materials

• Texture Compression: Enable texture compression to adjust the texture resolution for optimization at render time. Disable compression below a user defined pixel amount to limit the optimization for smaller textures.
• Material Override: Allows you to replace all materials in your scene with a single one. This is ideal for creating 'clay' renders.
• Custom MDL: Allows you to specify additional paths to custom MDL materials. See Using MDL for more details.

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