Trapcode Mir

Rendering Group

The Rendering group allows you to put the finishing touches on Mir, and gives you options for creating a variety of different looks with your geometry.

Multisample: Sets the number of sample points per pixel and is helpful as an anti-aliasing tool. Turn this control up to get rid of jagged edges around the Mir geometry. Keep in mind that the higher the setting, the more memory and render time will be required.

Because high Multisample values can significantly slow render times, we highly recommend that you turn multisampling down to a low setting when you first set up the path.

NOTE: Different video cards support different levels of multisampling. Mir will only let this be set as high as the card permits. Most cards will allow a value of 8, but some cards may be able to support 32.

Supersample: Allows you to oversample the entire scene. Unlike Multisample, Supersample also works on the interior of polygons. This is useful for example when using a detailed Reflection Environment Map (found in Material & Lighting > Image Based Lighting ). If the interior of polygons looks aliased (i.e. jagged), try using this setting. A value of 9x is recommended.

Higher values don’t lead to better quality in most cases, but it does take a lot of VRAM.

The Render Mode pop-up menu controls what is ultimately output by the plug-in.

There are six options:

• Full Render : this is the default mode. Renders the full scene.
• Normals : renders polygon normals. Normals describe how the polygon surface is oriented. This can be used for example to re-light a Mir render using another software application. In the Normals calculations, RGB = XYZ.
• Position : shows space position coordinates, where RGB = XYZ. This mode works best in 32 bpc (float).
• Depth : renders the distance from the eye for each pixel as a lightness (gray scale) value. This mode works best in 32 bpc (float) since the distance values can be outside the 0-255 range of 8 bpc. This can be useful when adding post effects such as Depth of Field to a Mir render.
• Depth Normalized : a normalized version of Depth, normalized so that the output range is 0-255 in 8 bpc, and 0-32767 in 16bpc and 0.0 - 1.0 in 32bpc (float). The Visibility > Near and Visibility > Far planes are mapped to min, max respectively. This mode was made so that depth can be rendered in 8bpc. This can be useful when adding post effects, such as Depth of Field to a Mir render.
• AO : renders only the ambient occlusion. This can be useful when re-lightning a Mir render or to just get more control over the AO (for example, blurring it before applying to Mir).

Depth of Field can either be set to Camera Settings or Off.

NOTES:

• Camera Settings will only work when AO (under the Shader group ) is turned on.
• The pixel blur radius for Mir is capped at extreme values around 300 pixels. If your blur extends to beyond that radius, the blur quality will potentially show deterioration.