The graphics display of a model is referred to as a view on the model, or a scene. The view is based on the settings you apply for visual styles, ground plane, ground reflections, shadows, lighting, and camera projection.
In the Engineer's Notebook, you can change the visual style of an individual view or all views in the note.
Scenes, what you see in the graphics area, display using either hardware rendering or software rendering. Hardware rendering is optimized for use when designing and working with your data. Software rendering is optimized to provide a rich, real-time visualization environment, and uses all of the available core processors of the machine.
Ground reflections give a sense of depth and dimension to the model view. They can reveal features that are hidden from the current camera angle.
You can turn on Ground Reflections for the active documents on a per document basis, or for all models you open. Use the Application Options settings to affect all models.
Lighting dramatically affects the appearance of a model, and plays an important part in communicating your design. Light direction, color, and brightness work together to complement your design. Lighting also affects the shadows in the scene.
Lighting styles support image-based lighting, and can show the model in a surrounding environment. Choosing a complementary light and modifying to fine tune the style is important to the visualization task. Each document supports one active lighting style, which you can modify. Before modifying a lighting style, display the shadow options you intend to use with it to ensure fidelity.
For more information, see the Lighting Styles topic.
You can enhance the appearance and clarity of the model by applying ground shadows, object shadows, and ambient shadows, either individually or as a whole. For example, you could use ambient and object shadows when working on complex shapes to bring out subtle details. Ground shadows can provide a sense of orientation. Turning on all shadow options provides the most realistic result.
During modeling, you can turn off texture display on solid surfaces modeling tasks to reduce surface complexity. See Textures On and Textures Off.
Choose from either orthographic or perspective projection. When modeling, orthographic projection is often easiest to use. When creating realistic imagery, perspective is the preferred view projection.
Section views graphically slice portions of a model to display internal features.
Application options provide control over the initial view appearance. You can specify that all documents open with a specific visual style, or at a document level, specify a visual style the document opens with. Each document is able to carry specific display appearance parameters for the elements mentioned. Use the Document appearance control to open any document in the manner you want to display it, regardless of how other models display.
You can override view elements temporarily by using the controls on the ribbon View tab, in the Appearance panel. Changes from the ribbon temporarily override the scene elements, and are not stored with the document or application appearance settings.
View effect settings access points are at the bottom of each list, such as lighting styles, shadows, and so on. Click Settings... to launch the document-based dialog box for that view effect. Your modifications appear in the document immediately and persist when you save the settings.