Allows you to create and save custom render settings as presets to reuse in other scenes.

• Store Preset - Stores render item channels as a preset. Only selected channels are saved. To select channels, open the Channels tab and Shift+click on the channels you want to save.

• Remove Preset - Removes the render preset. Built-in presets cannot be removed.

Choose between Modo's Default renderer and mPath.

When Renderer is set to mPath, this allows you to choose whether to use a CPU only, or a GPU ray tracing engine. The following options are available:

• Foundry SSE - Uses only the CPU for raycasting.

• NVIDIA OptiX - Offers increased performance, allowing for multiple buckets to take advantage of GPU raycasting simultaneously.

In animated scenes, the frame range specifies the sequence of frames rendered when you use the Render Animation command. First Frame specifies the first frame rendered, while Last Frame specifies the last frame rendered.

When rendering animated sequences, the frame Step value skips the specified number of frames. For example, when testing rendered sequences, rendering with a frame step of 2 (every other frame) cuts the overall render time in half. A frame step of 4 (every fourth frame) cuts the overall render time by three quarters and so on. This gives you a good idea of the final animated scene, albeit at a lower frame rate.

This function is relative to the Frame Range. If you specify frame 7 as your first frame with a step of 2, frames 7, 9, 11, 13, and so on are rendered. Swapping the Frame Range values and setting the value to a negative number causes Modo to render frames in reverse order.

Controls which frames are rendered during an animation rendering. You can enter in a frame range using commas or dashes to indicate specific frames or ranges of frames to render. The default ellipsis value (...) renders all frames between the start and end ranges.

This image shows examples of combining range numbers.

You can create a new range by clicking (new), specifying the Name and Value, and click OK. This new preset is added to the dropdown menu.

To delete a preset range, click the down arrow, select delete, choose the preset, and click OK.

To sort your presets, select Sort by Value or Sort by Name.

This control allows you to select how the rendered frame's image size is specified, either as pixels, inches or centimeters.

Frame Width and Height allow you to specify the size of the frame rendered when invoking the Render command. Dependent upon the resolution unit, if Pixels is selected, then you can specify the size in pixel units, or if Inches is specified, you can set the printed resolution of the rendered image in inches.

When set to Inches, the DPI setting is used to determine the number of pixels rendered. The typical widescreen video size of 720 pixels by 480 pixels is the default size.

Allows you to directly determine the number of Dots Per Inch. This is particularly useful when defining image height and width using the Inches resolution unit, as it is used to determine the final pixel resolution of the rendered images. It is also added to files on export, determining the eventual printed size of the image.

Note:  This option is only available in the Render Item, Channels viewport. You can only see this information if you have used inches or centimeters.

The Bucket size defines the number of pixel values calculated concurrently and is controlled by the Height and Width settings. The default value of 32 by 32 pixels means that each bucket is 32 pixels wide and 32 pixels high.

Using larger buckets increases the amount of memory required but can result in speed improvement. However, if multiple threads are being used, it is important to remember that using smaller buckets can result in a better load balanced total frame.

When using multiple buckets, it is unlikely that they finish rendering at exactly the same instant, therefore there is usually one bucket/thread computing when the other bucket(s)/thread(s) are finished.

If the buckets are very large, the amount of time the render engine is using only one thread increases, which decreases the impact of the additional processors on final render time. You might come to the conclusion that you should set the bucket size as small as possible, but this is incorrect as well.

System performance may decrease with the overhead to manage the buckets, while reducing anti-aliasing quality (as bucket borders cannot be anti-aliased to their neighboring pixels outside the bucket; decreasing the size of the bucket increases the number of border buckets).

We recommend that the default bucket size (32 x 32 pixels) is typically the ideal size when rendering video resolution sized frames.

Order determines the pattern in which the buckets are rendered. In some cases there can be a small performance benefit to certain patterns. In particular, the Hilbert pattern is designed to maximize bucket edge concurrency to reduce the amount of data that must be purged and loaded, whereas Random is most likely the least efficient in that regard. The following bucket orders are available:

• Rows - Renders the buckets in rows from left to right, starting and the top and working down.

• Columns - Renders the buckets in columns from top to bottom, starting on the right side and working to the left.

• Spiral - Renders the buckets from the center spot outward, in a clockwise spiraling pattern.

• Hilbert - Uses a specially formulated pattern that snakes across the screen making certain that there is as much concurrency from bucket to bucket across the entire frame.

This pattern can result in slightly improved render performance on certain hardware architectures that are not as efficient with bus bandwidth as it reduces the amount of data being loaded and purged from bucket to bucket.

• Random - Renders the buckets in a random order across the screen.

When enabled, the order of buckets is reversed. For example, the Columns pattern would start at the bottom right hand side of the image and work its way bottom to top in columns towards the left of the screen.

This button toggles the Render Region function on and off.

These percentage settings work in conjunction with each other to specify the total rendered region width and height. For example, you can render the left half of an image, regardless of the output resolution or aspect ratio, by setting the Right value to 50%.

You can also set a specific area by click dragging over the rendered image in the Render Preview window. When you do that, the render region toggle is automatically activated.

Other than disabling the function with the Render Region toggle, a single click anywhere on the Render Display restores the render to the full frame.

These options control the pixel resolution of baked images, independent of the Frame Width and Height settings used for rendering. This resolution is used when invoking any of the Bake to Render Output commands.