Max hardware rendering?

[andrewjohn81]

I did some searches, but couldn't find anything useful, possibly because max isn't as cool as Maya?
OK, yes, I'm an ex maya user. You could render things like wireframe using your video card, but as high res as you want, And you could use a multi-pass camera effect to simulate antialiasing.
Is there anything like that for Max? All I can seem to do is use "grab viewport" but that limits to screen size. Pretty much the same thing for doing a single frame animation preview, which at least claims to have the multipass camera effect, but it didn't seem to work.

[mike_kennedy]

I am guessing us Non Maya users are not clued into to what your asking about
There is no render to final hardware rendering in Max. Max Scan line was way faster than Maya's built in ray tracer so they never saw the need......

[tammo]

I use the "animation -> make preview" hardware preview feature a lot.
Set the size to 200% and scale it down in after effects to get anti-aliasing.
You can set it to render JPG sequences.
Turn on the new viewport shadows and ambient occlusion.

A client thought this was the final rendered (industrial-vis) animation.
I also do a lot of quick Black/white masks with this tool.

[andrewjohn81]

200% you say?
That's what i was hoping to do, only...it won't let me render larger than the size of my viewport. And this rendering happens to be 1600 tall already. My monitor is 1200 tall, which leaves, what maybe 950 for the viewport?

I'd be fine with the "grab viewport" feature if i could tell it what resolution to grab.

Someone wrote a plugin for Rhino called Auxpecker. They managed to do what I'm looking for in that. I wonder if the same kind of thing can be created for max. They have similar restraints in Rhino viewports, but the guy managed to allow you to snap a 10K, or whatever you want really, image of the viewport.
I think that's really what we could use. because you guys are right. Especially with the new hardware viewport rendering the quality is pretty good for certain things. Why couldn't we make that a final image on occasion? The data is already translated and shaded. We just need to save it for the most part.
I really want it mostly for line work.
In the same realm, I really wish the "copy" feature of a rendering worked at 1:1 while copying the entire image. Not sure if you all knew this, but it only copies what you can see on screen. Many times I just need a selection, so we use the RenderMask plugin. Amazing btw, if you haven't tried it. So I just needed one part, quickly rendered out a handle selection mask and want it in photoshop. Currently I have to save it, then open it in photoshop, then duplicate it in to my photoshop file. Copy and Paste would be nice.