form•Z RenderZone is the version of form•Z that includes photorealistic rendering based on the LightWorks® rendering engine

It offers seven levels of rendering: flat, Gouraud, Phong, preview z-buffer, full z-buffer, preview raytrace, and full raytrace.

One or more lights can be used, which can be distant (sun), cone, point, or projector lights. Any of these lights may appear to glow in images, and they are in addition to the globally available ambient light.

Both soft (bit-mapped) and hard (raytraced) shadows are produced by all the levels above Phong.

Both procedural and pre-captured textures are offered and can be mapped onto the surfaces of objects using five different mapping methods: flat, cubic, cylindrical, spherical, or parametric, which applies to NURBS surfaces. A preview environment offers easy methods for both positioning and viewing textures as they are mapped onto objects.

Cubic and spherical environment mapping, bumps, backgrounds that include alpha channel support, and depth effects can be applied starting with the preview z-buffer level. Blur is an example of a depth effect that simulates focusing your camera to a particular area of your modeling scene. Sky backgrounds that are procedurally generated come close to real skies that you may have captured with your camera.

Transparencies, reflections, and refractions can be applied at the full z-buffer and the full raytrace levels. The reflections and refractions are always correctly raytraced, even when they are produced by the z-buffer rendering. This is achieved by applying a mixed rendering method, where surfaces with no reflections are rendered using z-buffer, and the rendering effects of reflective surfaces are produced using raytracing.

State of the art shaders are used to render surfaces and other effects. A surface style is defined by up to four layers of shaders, which produce color, reflections, transparency, and bump effects. They can be applied independently or can be correlated. For example, the same procedural or precaptured texture can be used for the color, and then also as a transparency filter or bump mask. Surface styles can be assigned to complete objects, or to groups of faces called texture groups.

Decals can be attached on top of other surface styles to produce a variety of rendering effects, such as labels on objects, graffiti on walls, partially reflective surfaces, masked transparencies, and more. Up to thirty-two decals can be applied to a single object, and because these decals may freely overlap, the rendering effects can be combined in virtually unlimited ways.

Mixed wire frame and shaded renderings can be produced in the same image, in both form•Z and RenderZone. The wire frames can even cast shadows.

Natural looking trees, which have been precaptured, can be included in renderings with particular ease.

Libraries with predefined materials are included and can be easily extended and customized by users.

Images can be rendered and saved in a variety of user controlled sizes and resolutions, to a maximum of 16,000 x 16,000 pixels. Partially rendered images can also be produced and saved.

The Imager, a utility which is incorporated in the program and is also available independently, can be used to batch render sequences of images whose viewing and rendering parameters are previously set and saved.

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