Basic Rendering Engine

Choose Basic Rendering Engine from the Engine drop-down menu in the PhotoRendering Settings dialog box (Document > Creative Imaging > PhotoRendering Settings).

Note: The speed of PhotoRendering is defined most of all by image size, while model complexity affects speed if shadows are used. The PhotoRendering effects define the final quality or character of your rendering.

Basic Rendering Engine Effects Panel

Use these controls to select the PhotoRendering effects you want to use:

Method

The Method setting determines how closely the program should adhere to its ultimate imaging capacity.

Best: The program calculates the light attributes of each pixel. As the choices decrease in quality, ARCHICAD calculates individual values for every second or third pixel only. The quality increase will affect curved surfaces more than others.

Using multiple light sources or picture mapping may require the Final or Best settings.

Flat Shading: Results in each shape being roughly approximated by flat surfaces only. Special effects like Transparency, Fog, Emission, Smooth Surfaces, Highlights and Light Decay are unavailable. The Flat Shading option is faster than all the other options in this dialog box, but slower than when the 3D Style uses Shaded mode.

Effects

Effects let you enable a variety of light and surface effects, some of which are initially set in the Options > Element Attributes > Surfaces dialog box.

For more information, see Surface Settings Dialog Box.

Highlights: Check this to use specular reflections as highlights

Note: If Highlights is unchecked, or the Flat Shading method is used, specular reflections are ignored in the rendering.

Emission: Check this if you have chosen, or created, light emitting Surfaces and want this quality to be displayed in the renderings.

 Fog: Check this box to apply a fog effect to the rendered image. Choose a color and intensity (low, middle, high) for the fog effect.

Transparency: Transparent elements (such as glass) will be rendered as transparent. (If you leave this box unchecked, such elements will be shown as opaque.)

Smooth Surfaces: Set the degree of smoothing, with up to one pixel accuracy. Curved surfaces, which are normally approximated by flat planes, are represented by more lifelike surfaces when this option is on.

Lamp Falloff: If this is unchecked, the angle falloff and distance falloff values in the GDL Scripts of Lamps will be considered zero. This results in a sharp border between illuminated and dark areas. If it is checked, the values originally given will be used, resulting in a smooth transition between illuminated and dark areas.

Note: Lamps must be enabled at the Light Sources checkboxes for falloff to operate.

Textures: Check this box to display bitmapped pictures on the corresponding surfaces.

It also controls whether the textures linked to surfaces in the Surfaces dialog box are displayed in PhotoRenderings as described.

For more information, see Surface Settings Dialog Box.

Antialiasing

Controls the contour quality of your renderings. Jaggedness of the contour is gradually eliminated as you move from Off to Best.

You may want to use the Best option only for final documents, since processing time increases along with quality.

Light Sources

Select which Light Sources (Sun, Lamps or both) you want to use to illuminate the model during the PhotoRendering process.

The Lamps checkbox can only be effective if Lamp type library parts have been placed on the plan. They must be switched on in their Settings dialog box.

Shadow Casting

Define which of the available light sources you want to cast shadows in the PhotoRendered picture.

Check the High Accuracy box if you notice incorrect results on your PhotoRendered picture, especially missing shadows of relatively small elements. This may occur if you zoom in on a small detail of an otherwise large project in the 3D Window and make a photorendering of that detail.

If the Use transparency checkbox is checked, ARCHICAD will create different shadows for surfaces with different transparency. The color of the transparent surface will also affect the color of the shadow in the final photorendering. This is also valid for surfaces with Alpha channel, where the Alpha channel is used to define the transparency of the surface.

Texture Antialiasing

Use the slider to set the desired image quality. As this procedure is very time consuming, use it only if you require a superior image quality for printing.

Basic Rendering Engine Background Panel

See CineRender Basic Settings: Background Panel.

Basic Rendering Engine Brightness Panel

This panel of the dialog box gives you choices regarding exposure.

Use the dimmer switch to set the desired brightness from dark to bright.

You have three options for correcting possible Overexposures. (Overexposure occurs when the computational method results in a brighter color requirement than the brightest white on the monitor.)

Darken All Surfaces: ARCHICAD can make all surfaces darker than their computed color and make the brightest color white. This keeps the contrast between bright and dark parts of the image, but details in darker areas may be lost.

Darken Overexposed Surfaces: You can choose to darken only the overexposed surfaces. This way, dark areas will not be extremely dark, but the contrast between shades in bright areas will be smaller.

Paint Overexposed Surfaces with: Select a color for these surfaces to show their place in the picture. This is an editing tool that helps you fine-tune the lighting of your renderings by changing elements of the model (e.g., relocating or dimming individual lamps) rather than applying one of the overall corrections described above.

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