Visualization

Describes improvements to rendering.

Replace Shader by Name

You can now replace shaders in the scene with shaders or materials of the same name from a specified Shader Library of directory. For example, if your current scene contains imported geometry with non-Alias shaders, you can replace one or more of the shaders with Alias shaders or other materials. To replace shaders using the new Replace Shaders by Name feature, both shader names must be identical. You can choose to replace all shaders used in the scene or select the shaders you want to replace.

Access the Replace Shader by Name from the Multi-lister (Render > Multi-lister) Edit menu. For more information, see Replace a shader by name.

Anti-Alias updates

There are now separate Anti-Alias option windows for wireframe (WindowDisplay > Anti-Alias > Wireframe Anti-Alias) and shaded (WindowDisplay > Anti-Alias > Shaded Anti-Alias). We've also added the following improvements to the Shaded Anti-Alias options:

• A new Supersampling option improves the anti-alias quality by a factor of four, which results in overall quality of 64x when Hardware Anti-Alias in set to 16x. Note that using Supersampling affects rendering performance.
• You no longer need to restart Alias when setting Hardware Anti-Alias to 16x.

Dynamic Section Improvements

You can now drive the sections and visual clipping using a construction plane. Selecting a construction plane in your scene now defines the object clipping. A new Picked Plane option indicates that a connection exists between the selected plane and the geometry to drive the sections and the clipping.

BoxMode shader additions

A new Subdivision only option for the BoxMode shader lets you isolate the shader's effect to subdivision bodies only. For example, if your scene includes both NURBS surfaces and subdivision objects, only the subdivision objects are shaded in BoxMode. This option is on by default.