Full (Progressive) Settings

Relight: Select this option if you plan to create multiple renderings to produce an animation or lighting study. Then options to change the emitter power and color will become available during post-processing.; Tip: We recommend turning off Relight when only a single rendering is needed because it is demanding in terms of memory. During initialization, multiple buffers—one for each light group—are allocated so that the results can be blended when producing an animation sequence. Since each of these light buffers must converge, the overall convergence is slower than when rendering into a single buffer (where a bright emitter may quickly hide noise from a dim one).

General

Cores (0 = max): For every physical core, there is one virtual core. So a quad core computer actually has eight cores total (four physical, four virtual). Since the number of cores is always a multiple of two, select an even number to avoid ambiguity.; To use all available cores, keep the default value of 0.; To find out how many cores you have, hover the cursor over the entry field until a double-headed arrow appears. Click and drag towards the right until it reaches the maximum value.
Displacement: Deselect to reduce rendering time.
Volumetric Scattering: Render shafts of light and volumetric shadows cast from geometric objects.
Time Limit (min): Enter 0 for no limit.
Max Samples: Control how many times each pixel will be calculated and refined. This is useful for producing an animation because you can make sure each frame is rendered to the same quality.; Enter 0 for no limit.

Depth: Depth Channel gives the depth (distance along camera Z-axis) of the first hit objects in the scene. The depth values will be mapped afterwards to a gray-scale image according to Min/Max Z.
Normal: Stores the normals of the first hit objects in the scene. Black is assigned to vector (-1,-1,-1), while white is assigned to vector (1,1,1). Due to the normalization of surface normals, these values are never reached; instead we get intermediate colors.
Alpha: Create an opaqueness grayscale image with respect to the background. A black color corresponds to no opaqueness (background is fully visible) while a gray color corresponds to partial opaqueness.
Object ID: Display each object in a distinct color.
Mask: Mask selected objects/groups and create masks for post-processing processes.
Invert Mask: Display indexed objects in black and other objects in white.
Position: Display the position of each point of the scene regarding the global frame; useful for post-processing purposes.
UV: Display the UV coordinates of objects in the scene.