The settings in this section directly affect image's quality. By definition, image quality settings also affect image rendering speed.
3Delight's Quality render settings.
Shading Samples
The amount of rays, per pixel, the renderer will trace to perform shading computations. These computations include BRDF sampling, light sampling, subsurface sampling, transparency and any other shading element requested by the Materials. 3Delight uses an adaptive algorithm to automatically select the right shading component to sample, on a per-ray basis.
This is the only samples settings in 3Delight for Maya as there are no per-material or per-BRDF settings.
Pixel Samples
The amount of Camera rays to trace per pixel. This controls the anti-aliasing (AA) quality of the rendered image.
In 3Delight, screen sampling and surface shading are disconnected. In other renderers, increasing the amount of "AA" samples will also increase the amount of shading samples, not so in 3Delight. This allows for consistant control over rendered quality.
Pixel Filter
Filter Width
These two parameters select the shape and the size of the screen filter. The available filter types are : gaussian, mitchell, catmull-rom, sinc, box and triangle.
We recommend to use a gaussian pixel filter with a filter width of 2 as this will produce optimal quality.
The mitchell, catmull-rom and sinc filter are legacy filters that were suitable in scanline renderers (such as REYES algorithms) in which sharpening was used to compensate for the blur introduced by the lack of shading samples per pixel. In a path-tracer, every camera ray contributes to shading and renders are crisp by default. Using these sharp filters in a context of a path-tracer is thus counter productive. Note that these filters need to have filter widths larger than 4 in order to work as designed.
The box and triangle filtler are provided for completeness.
Motion Blur
Enables motion blur for the entire scene. By default, 3Delight will use a 2 step motion blur.
Max Reflection Depth
Max Refraction Depth
Max Hair Depth
Max Diffuse Depth
Max Distance