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Main Toolbar > Render Production flyout >
(ActiveShade)
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Main Toolbar >
(Render Setup) > Render Setup dialog > Target drop-down list > ActiveShade Mode
For the Scanline renderer, there is only one ActiveShade option: floating, where the ActiveShade rendering appears in its own window.
Note: Physical materials are not supported.
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.
Initialize or Tools Update from the lower-right quadrant of the quad menu.
Only one ActiveShade window can be active at a time.
Tip: You can drag and drop materials from the Material Editor to ActiveShade windows 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.
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. 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.
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).