Optimizing viewport display properties

- [Instructor] In preparation for material editing, we want to explore our options for previewing the materials, either in ActiveShade or in Nitrous, which is the viewport display technology that uses the video card to accelerate the display of geometry. As we saw early, we can launch an ActiveShade window. And we'll see interactive production rendering, in this case an Arnold rendering. And it's a pure Arnold rendering, and it will look very similar to a production rendering. I'll close that window. We can also render ActiveShade directly in the viewport. If we go up to the viewport shading window, in this case labeled Standard, we can click on that and from the menu choose ActiveShade using Arnold. And once that initializes, we'll see that it's a little bit different from the floating window. We can see non-rendering elements such as cameras, lights, and helper objects such as this drone helper. We're actually seeing Nitrous superimposed with Arnold. All right, we'll switch this back to a standard view by turning ActiveShade using Arnold off. If you want a little bit better preview, you can do that automatically or manually. The automatic method is to switch the shading mode over into High Quality. And the only real difference it makes in this case is we see a shadow projected on the ground plane. And if you remember in our ActiveShade rendering, it was a very soft shadow because we're illuminating the scene with the background environment color. But the Nitrous viewport does not recognize that background environment color inasmuch as it doesn't show the proper lighting. We're still seeing default lighting in this view. I prefer actually to customize the display instead of using High Quality mode. So I'll switch this back over to Standard. Then go back into that menu into Lighting and Shadows and enable these options. I'm going to illuminate with scene lights so that when I actually add some scene lights, we'll be able to see those. Go back in there again. Lighting and Shadows. I also want to enable shadows manually. And finally, optionally, we can go in there and enable ambient occlusion, which will give us some contact shadows and some shading in the cracks and crevices of things. Even better, we can optimize the viewports for material preview by customizing them in the Per-View Presets. Go back up to the shading menu, which is now labeled User Defined, and from the menu choose Per-View Presets. And we want to make some changes here. First of all, we want to make sure that we'll be able to illuminate the viewport with all of the lights in the scene instead of just four lights maximum. And to do that, we can switch the rendering level here to Advanced, and this automatically changes to Scene Lights Unlimited Lights. Also in here, we can turn on soft edge shadows just so that we are not annoyed by this spurious shadow here. We'll do do that by going into the Lighting and Shadows Quality pull-down list. And we can switch this over to Point Lights Soft-Edge Shadows. And when we add lights in our scene, they're automatically going to be recognized as point lights with soft-edge shadows. So we might want to go back in here and switch this out later, but for now this is going to give us a better approximation of our environment lighting. Again, we can enable ambient occlusion. We did that from the menu, so it's already on, likewise with shadows. I'm just going to leave those at mostly their default settings, except I'll just reduce the intensity of ambient occlusion to a value of 1.0. And then, importantly, down here we have the material rendering level. We want to set that to Advanced Material, and that way the materials will be displayed in realistic mode. I'm going to enable this for all views. Turn on Apply to All Views, and these settings will be applied to all shaded viewports. Click OK, and it'll take a moment to update. But once it does, we'll see we have much better rendering in both the physical camera view and the perspective view down here. And it looks like it's not quite updating yet, so I can just move the viewport with the middle mouse button, and that'll force an update. Since we applied that setting to all views, it has changed our orthographic views from wireframe to shaded, so we'll just switch those back. Click in the left view and press F3, and likewise click in the top view and press F3. And that's how to optimize viewport display for material editing.