Loading ...
Loading ...
Loading ...
more natural, and they’re enabled in the Shadows parameters of the Controls tab of light nodes; you
can choose Sampling Quality and Softness type, and adjust Spread, Min Softness, and Filter Size
sliders. Additionally, the software renderer supports alpha channels in shadow maps, allowing
transparency to alter shadow density.
When the Renderer3D node “Renderer Type” drop-down is set to OpenGL Renderer, you cannot render
soft shadows or excessively large textures (left). When the Renderer3D node “Renderer Type” drop-
down is set to Software Renderer, you can render higher-quality textures and soft shadows (right).
OpenGL Renderer
The OpenGL renderer takes advantage of the GPU in your computer to render the image; the textures
and geometry are uploaded to the graphics hardware, and OpenGL shaders are used to produce the
result. This can produce high-quality images that can be perfect for final rendering, and can also be
potentially orders of magnitude faster than the software renderer, but it does pose some limitations on
some rendering effects, as soft shadows cannot be rendered, and the OpenGL renderer also ignores
alpha channels during shadow rendering, resulting in a shadow always being cast from the
entire object.
On the other hand, because of its speed, the OpenGL renderer exposes additional controls for
Accumulation Effects that let you enable depth of field rendering for creating shallow-focus effects.
Unfortunately, you can’t have both soft shadow rendering and depth of field rendering, so you’ll need
to choose which is more important for any given 3D scene you render.
Don’t Forget That You Can Combine Rendered Scenes in 2D
While it may seem like an insurmountable limitation that you can’t output both soft shadows
and depth of field using the same renderer, don’t forget that you can create multiple 3D
scenes each using different renderers and composite them in 2D later on. Furthermore, you
can also render out auxiliary channels that can be used by 2D image processing nodes such
as AmbientOcclusion, DepthBlur, and Fog to create pseudo-3D effects using the
rendered images.
OpenGL UV Renderer
When you choose the OpenGL UV Renderer option, a Renderer3D node outputs an “unwrapped”
version of the textures applied to upstream objects, at the resolution specified within the Image tab of
that Renderer3D node.
Chapter 853D Compositing Basics 1524
Loading ...
Loading ...
Loading ...