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- Render: Initiate an Interactive Render to RenderMan
- Stop: Cancel or End the interactive render (you may also stop the render from "it")
- Render in Background: Render while keeping the Houdini UI available
- Dump Rib: Export a RIB file (defaults to the location of your .hip scene file) The default is Binary to save space. You may change this in the RIB Tab
- Bake: Run a bake render to bake pattern networks
- Controls...: Additional options for rendering like quality overrides and frame settings
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- Pixel Variance: This is your main quality control for the render. Lower values are higher quality. Typical production settings are 0.005 to 0.001 (extreme high quality). 0.01 is reasonable good to medium quality depending on scene complexity
- Sampling
- Minimum Samples: The lowest number of sample required per-pixel. A value of 0 takes the nearest square root of the Maximum Samples setting. Higher numbers may be necessary to capture small image features like small particles or thin hair
- Extra Minimum Samples: If a pixel fails the variance test, this value forces a specified number of additional samples before testing the variance again. At 0 it defaults to the same number as the Minimum Samples
- Maximum Samples: The most samples we will take before stopping samples on a pixel. Higher values may be necessary when rendering depth of field, motion blur, or other noisy effects
- Dark Falloff: If an area of the image is darker than this threshold, stop sampling since it won't be visible or perceived
- Adapt All: Test all the AOVs against the variance threshold. This means your AOVs are more likely to be noise-free but can significantly increase render times as some AOVs may trigger more samples without much gain to image quality
- Hider
- Raytrace Hider:This is used to render an image
- Bake Hider:This is used to invoke pattern baking
- Incremental: Render frame passes instead of bucket/tile based rendering. Preferred for most rendering choices including batched and checkpointed renders
- Pixel Filter Mode
- Weighted: This is the default setting where samples are filtered together
- Importance: This is required for denoising applications (Hyperion or Nvidia) where pixels are independent of one another
- Sample Offset: This allows several images to be rendered in parallel (with different sampleoffset values) and then combined
- Extreme Motion/DOF: Changed the sampling technique when depth of field or motion blur is extreme/dominant in the image. This is more accurate but introduces some overhead
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See also Renderer Options for more details
- Checkpoint Render: Batch render a scene while incrementally leaving checkpoint files for viewing or restarting later
- Search Paths: These point to locations where RenderMan should look for custom plugins, image directories, and more
- Shader Path: Path to find shader plugins
- Texture Path: Path to search for texture files
- Display Path: Path to find Display plugins
- Archive Path: Path for finding and loading delayed read archives/RIB
- Procedural Path: Path to find procedural plugins (like Maya's Xgen)
- Rix Plugin Path: Path to other RenderMan plugins
- Directory Map: Path remapping
- Limits: These define memory limits for certain features of the renderer. On modern machines you may have enough memory to hold most entities in RAM, but for some parts of the render you may be able to efficiently reduce the memory used to render large scenes (geometry must be in-memory) We attempt to set this at reasonable limits by default. For more information, look under Configuration
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