The era looks

Each of Orbit's five render looks copies the pictures of one kind of 1990s software. RAY '95 and TERRA '96 follow the desktop ray tracers and landscape programs of the middle of the decade. RADIOSITY '96 shows light bouncing around a room, as architectural renderers did. The 3D cards and game consoles of the late 1990s are the model for GLIDE '99, and CHROME 2000 takes after the product and logo renderers of the turn of the millennium. A look is a set of values for the controls in RENDER SETTINGS, plus a few traits that have no control. Knowing which setting produces which part of a look lets you borrow from one and build another.

#What a look is made of

A look has three layers. The shading settings, SURFACE, SPECULAR, AMBIENT and REFLECTION with the REFL DEPTH and GLOSSY RAYS budgets, decide how light falls on each surface. The output settings turn the finished brightness into pixels in a file, through GAMMA, TONEMAP, the color cast, COLOR DEPTH, DITHER and ANTI-ALIASING. The traits make up the third layer, five choices built into a look that no control in the sheet can reach.

Clicking a look sets all three layers at once. Changing a control in SHADING or OUTPUT afterward, other than ANTI-ALIASING, turns the PRESET row to CUSTOM, and the traits stay as that look set them, since no control can change them.

The settings under EFFECTS are not part of any look, although picking a look can switch some of them off. No look switches one on. The values of every look are listed in Render settings.

#RAY '95

RAY '95 copies a ray tracer of the mid-1990s on a desktop computer, where every extra ray lengthened a render that already took a long time. The program traced as few rays as it could. It sent one ray toward the center of each light to decide whether a point was lit, which gives every shadow a hard edge, area lights included. It followed a reflection for one bounce (REFL DEPTH 1), so a chrome ball shows the objects around it, and a second chrome object seen in it shows its own color with nothing reflected in it. It traced one ray per pixel, leaving the edges of objects stepped, and it read the nearest pixel of a texture, which turns an image into visible squares when the camera comes close.

The shadow side of an object gets FLAT fill, an even, dim share of its own color. Highlights follow Phong's 1975 formula (SPECULAR PHONG) and can shrink to pinpoints. Reflections are added on top of the surface color, and with TONEMAP at CLIP anything brighter than white turns flat white, so a bright chrome surface burns out to white patches. The caption BLOWOUT names this burnout.

Like many programs of the time, the look writes the picture to the file with no correction for the display (GAMMA LINEAR), which darkens the midtones and hardens the contrast. DITHER NOISE adds a fine grain over the whole frame.

#TERRA '96

TERRA '96 copies the landscape programs of the same years, which lit hills and water with light from the whole dome of the sky. Its fill is SKY-TINTED, taking its color from the sky in the direction a surface faces, so ground that faces up takes on the color of the sky overhead, and surfaces that face down get a dimmer, more neutral fill. A TEMPERATURE of −0.15 lowers red and raises blue by a few percent across the picture, a faint cool cast like that of distant haze.

Landscapes are full of thin silhouettes, ridges and trees against the sky, where stepped edges show most, so this look traces four rays per pixel (ANTI-ALIASING 2×2 (4 SAMPLES)). Otherwise it stays close to RAY '95, with LINEAR gamma, NOISE grain, PHONG highlights, FIXED reflections that bounce once and hard shadows from area lights. Its highlights stop at a medium size, and its textures are smoothed.

Fog belongs to the scene in Orbit and is saved in its file, so the look cannot add it by itself. When you pick it in a scene without fog, the TERRA PAIRS WITH FOG banner offers to add a thin blue fog, and ENABLE writes it into the scene. The look leaves glow and lens flare as they were.

#GLIDE '99

GLIDE '99 copies the games of the late 1990s drawn by 3D graphics cards and home consoles. That hardware had to finish a whole frame many times a second, so it lit each triangle only at its three corners and blended the colors across the face, the method Henri Gouraud published in 1971. SURFACE GOURAUD does the same. On a coarse object, a highlight that falls between corners is lost, and a highlight near one corner slides across the face as the object turns. Raising SIDES and SEGMENTS puts the corners closer together and brings small highlights back.

Color is worked out only at the corners, so image textures and bumps, which vary between them, are not drawn under GOURAUD. Terrain colors that change with height do show, since Orbit gives each corner the color of its height. The viewport follows GOURAUD too, so the corner lighting shows while you model.

The frame held 16 bits per pixel, 5 for red, 6 for green and 5 for blue, which shows as bands across smooth gradients such as a sky. The cards broke the bands up with a fixed pattern, and DITHER BAYER 4 draws that crosshatch, repeating every 4 pixels. Highlights are broad and soft, fill is FLAT, reflections bounce once, and edges are not smoothed. Unlike the two looks before it, GLIDE '99 corrects gamma for the display. Picking it switches off glow, lens flare and depth of field.

#CHROME 2000

CHROME 2000 copies the product shots and logo animations of the turn of the millennium, when a render was expected to look clean. It adds no grain, keeps 24 bits of color, corrects gamma for the display and smooths edges with four rays per pixel.

Its reflections use Schlick's 1994 approximation (REFLECTION SCHLICK). Polished surfaces reflect more at a glancing angle than face on, so the rim of a chrome letter mirrors more of the scene than its front. Reflections bounce twice, which lets one chrome object show another's reflection. Highlights can shrink to pinpoints, and on long curved shapes they draw thin bright streaks. TONEMAP SOFT CLIP eases the brightest values toward white, so a hot highlight keeps a little shading where CLIP would leave a flat white patch. Area lights cast soft shadows. Picking the look leaves glow, lens flare and depth of field as they were.

#RADIOSITY '96

RADIOSITY '96 is modeled on the renderers that showed how light moves around a room. The radiosity method of the time divided every surface into patches and worked out how much light each patch passed to every other, so a red wall tinted the white floor beside it. Orbit gets a similar result by another route. With AMBIENT set to GATHERED, each point the camera sees sends 8 rays (GATHER RAYS) into the space above its surface and adds up the light from whatever they strike. A shaded corner then picks up the color of the walls around it, and a room closed on all sides goes dark but not black.

The gathering covers one bounce, and only the surfaces the camera sees directly. Surfaces seen in a reflection or through glass get SKY-TINTED fill. Each of the 8 rays needs lighting of its own where it lands, so a render takes longer than it would with SKY-TINTED fill, and raising GATHER RAYS lengthens it further. GLOSSY RAYS at 4 lets rough materials blur their reflections. Area lights cast soft shadows, highlights stay small, SOFT CLIP eases the brightest values and edges are smoothed. Ambient occlusion is switched off, because the gathered rays already darken corners and a second darkening would overdo it.

#CUSTOM

CUSTOM is the name the row shows when the SHADING and OUTPUT settings match none of the five looks. Orbit starts in that state. On first launch its settings give a late 1990s production look, with BLINN-PHONG highlights brightened by 1.4 times, SKY-TINTED fill, SCHLICK reflections that bounce twice, corrected gamma, CLIP and soft shadows from area lights. It has no grain and no edge smoothing. They are not one of the five, so after another look has been picked, no control brings them back.

#Build a look of your own

The traits come only from a look, so start from one that has the traits you want.

Everything else comes from controls, and these work the same in every look.

To pick a look and adjust it, follow Choose a render look. Render settings lists every control, and The viewport, the preview and the render covers the parts of a look that the viewport shows.