Scanline ActiveShade

The Default Scanline renderer is also the default renderer for ActiveShade.

• Main Toolbar > Render Production flyout > (ActiveShade)
• Main Toolbar > (Render Setup) > Render Setup dialog > Target drop-down list > ActiveShade Mode
• Click or right-click the Point-Of-View (POV) viewport label. > Point-Of-View (POV) Viewport Label Menu > Extended Viewports > ActiveShade

For the Scanline renderer, there are two ActiveShade options:

• Viewport The ActiveShade rendering appears in the active viewport.
• Floater The ActiveShade rendering appears in its own window.
  Note: You can't make a maximized viewport an ActiveShade window, or maximize an ActiveShade window.

Both the viewport and floating versions of the ActiveShade window have the controls that are a subset of the Rendered Frame Window controls. In an ActiveShade viewport, the toolbar is off by default. In a floating ActiveShade window, the toolbar is always visible.

In an active ActiveShade viewport, you can toggle toolbar display by pressing spacebar. (This is a main user interface shortcut, so the Keyboard Shortcut Override Toggle can be either on or off.)

Tip: If you clear the image, you can redisplay it by right-clicking the ActiveShade window and choosing Tools Initialize or Tools Update from the lower-right quadrant of the quad menu.

Only one ActiveShade window can be active at a time. If you choose one of the ActiveShade commands while an ActiveShade window is already active, you get an alert that asks whether you want to close the previous one. If the previous ActiveShade window was docked in a viewport, the viewport reverts to the view it previously showed.

Tip: You can drag and drop materials from the Material Editor to ActiveShade windows and viewports, as you can with other viewports.

Scanline ActiveShade and Object Selection

If you select an object before you invoke ActiveShade, ActiveShade is done only for that object. This can greatly increase the speed of ActiveShade.

Similarly, once the ActiveShade window is open, the initialize and update steps (whether automatic or manual) are done only for the selected object.

In a "docked" ActiveShade viewport, you can select objects by right-clicking, turning on Select Object in the Tools (lower-right) quadrant of the quad menu, then clicking the object you want to select. In an ActiveShade viewport, only one object at a time can be selected.

Tip: When an object in an ActiveShade window has a mapped material, select it before you change a map or adjust its parameters.

What Scanline ActiveShade Does and Doesn't Do

For the sake of interactivity, the ActiveShade window is limited in what it can update interactively. An ActiveShade rendering is typically less precise than a final production rendering.

Tip: When you change geometry by transforming it or modifying it, right-click the ActiveShade window and choose Tools Initialize from the quad menu (lower-right quadrant). This updates the ActiveShade rendering.

• Moving an object does not update the ActiveShade window.
• Applying a modifier or otherwise changing object geometry does not interactively update the ActiveShade window.
• Reflections are rendered only in the Initialize pass.
• Materials are displayed as RGBA data with 8 bits per channel.
• Multiple changes to a material might lead to deterioration in image quality.

  If you see this happening, right-click the ActiveShade window and choose Tools Initialize from the quad menu (lower-right quadrant).

• Masks are reduced from 8x8 to 4x4 subdivisions per pixel. The mask is corrected to 6-bit opacity (0 to 63 rather than 0 to 255). This might result in some visual noise around object edges.
• Because of the preceding item, filters are coarser than in full-scale renderings, but they still have significant subpixel information.
• There is a limitation of 16 subdivisions per pixel. Because of this, any objects behind the sixteenth occluding object for a given pixel will be ignored. Rendered back faces count as separate objects.
• Reshading uses compressed normals and other direction vectors. This should have no visible effect.
• ActiveShade does not render atmospheric effects, rendering effects, or ray-traced shadows (the only shadows it can render are shadow-mapped shadows).