Output Images

The View Scale parameter allows you to specify that your image to be output will be "n" times larger (or smaller if a fraction less than 1.0 is specified) than your current Window Size

When the Autoscale FF Font toggle is selected all Forward Facing fonts in the image will be scaled depending upon the size of the output image.

The suffix specified for the Image Filename determines the type of output.

• For PNG (portable network graphics), a compression slider is provided. The max value of 9 results in a very small increase in compute time for compressing the images. Since PNG is a LOSSLESS compression format, the quality of the image is not affected by this value.
• For JPEG, a quality parameter is provided. Higher qualities result in less LOSS to the image but create much larger files. We recommend using PNG instead of JPEG whenever possible. The PNG images are often smaller and are always higher quality than a JPEG image.

The Anti Aliasing option renders an image that is twice as big as the specified Width and Height. This high resolution image is then filtered and subsetted to the specified size. This process reduces the brightness (contrast) of fine lines but it also smooths the lines and dramatically reduces jaggies.

The Mask Background toggle allows you to create an image with a transparent background.  In order to accomplish this, several things must be done:

• You must specify an image type that supports transparent backgrounds.  PNG is recommended

• You must have a background color which is unique from any pixels in your objects which are rendered.  This can be somewhat difficult if you have a rendered object with shading and specular highlights.  Shading creates darker versions of the colors in your datamap and specular highlights creates less saturated (more white) versions of those colors.  To avoid creating object colors that match your background, a masking background color should be selected which has a unique HUE not found in your datamap.

• Anti-Aliasing and filtering will intelligently detect the edges that are transparent and not mix in "pink" edges on your objects.

NOTE: There is no tolerance for matching the background color.  The color must match the RGB value exactly.

TIP: The mask background function can be used to create transparent HOLES in your images.  For example, a lake, which is rendered as a unique color could become a transparent hole in your rendered output.  In order to accomplish this, the object which represents the lake must be colored to exactly match your mask color and it must have its surface rendering set to "Flat Shading".The Select File button is used to bring up a standard windows file browser for choosing the name and location of the file to create. The Accept Current Values push button begins creation of the file.