We can set it up to allow some processing overhead so that other operations in 3ds Max won't be slowed down. That gives us control over how Arnold uses the computer's processing power. In the System tab, in the Render Settings rollout, down at the bottom, there's this section labeled Threads. To maximize productivity, we want to make a couple quick adjustments to the processing settings for Arnold. We'll talk more about this when we get to the chapter on rendering. If we click on that pulldown list, we'll see we have a couple other options. Let's switch the target mode over to ActiveShade mode. The default target is Production Rendering Mode, which is for offline rendering of images to disk. So we can store different settings for each target. When we choose a different target from this pulldown list, the settings that we choose will apply to that target mode. Up at the top is a pulldown list labeled Target. Render Setup is the one that looks like a teapot with a gear. On the main toolbar, we've got some teapot icons on the far right. But for the sake of simplicity and compatibility with other renderers, I'm going to use ActiveShade in this course. ARV has helpful features not found in ActiveShade, such as snapshots and rendering statistics. The Arnold Render View or ARV only works with Arnold. ActiveShade is the generic IPR that works with other renderers. There are actually two forms of IPR for Anold. When designing lighting, we should preview the results in our private production renderer, which is Arnold by default in Max. That means there's no bounce light and no proper reflections and there are some other limitations. Nitrous can render some pretty good direct illumination, but it does not support ray tracing. We previously saw how to set up the Nitrous viewport options to get a good approximation of the lighting and shading. So see most accurate feedback setting up lights, we can run an interactive production rendering or IPR. In this chapter, we'll get an introduction to lighting in 3ds Max.

3ds render