Render settings

This panel, which is located on the Render tab of the main window, lets you modify the general parameters for rendering images and movies.

Parameters

Rendering range

Selects the animation frames to be rendered. If you render a sequence of animation frames, you should also set an output movie file to let OVITO write the rendered animation to disk.

Output image size

Specifies the width and height of the rendered image or movie in pixels.

Save to file

Activate this option to write the generated image or movie to a file. Otherwise the rendered image is only displayed in the frame buffer window without saving it. After clicking the Choose... button to pick an output file name this option will be checked automatically.

When rendering an animation sequence, all frames are written to a single movie file if you select a movie format (e.g. AVI). If you choose an image format instead (e.g. PNG), OVITO writes a sequence of image files and appends the frame number to the selected filename.

Background

You can choose between a uniform background color and a transparent background. If set to transparent, OVITO will make those areas of the output image transparent that are not covered by any object. This is useful if you intend to put the image in front of some other background later, for instance on a presentation slide. Note that transparency information (alpha channel) must be supported by the image file format for this to work (best choice is PNG format).

Switch renderer

Use this to select a different rendering engine. OVITO provides two rendering back-ends, which differ in terms of quality and rendering speed. By default the hardware-accelerated OpenGL renderer is active, which is the same rendering engine used in the interactive viewports. The Tachyon renderer, in contrast, is a software-based raytracing engine that offers better shading algorithms, but which is slower.

To start the rendering process, click the Render Active Viewport button.