The Rendering DialogueYou have made it to the end of your animation and now need to render it! Don't worry, the render setup is fairly easy to navigate for beginners. Later on there will be a huge abundance of settings to create good high quality images for your rendered movie.

Once you are finished with your scene, still, animation, whatever you have been doing in 3DS Max and want to render it out to a finalized image which you can use as flat artwork, or edit together as a movie in an editing software. You will have to open the Render Setup tab.

F10 is the hotkey for Render Setup, you can also get there by clicking the third button in that resembles a teapot from the right hand side. It should look like a teapot over the right corner of a settings dialogue window.

or the rendering menu at the top in the main menus . ---->

The render setup dialogue box will open, and it should default to the Common Tab. If not go to the common tab now.

After you get to the Common tab. You will first see the Time Output, this is how long (how many frames) you wish to render.

Single - Will render only a single image, of whatever frame your scrubber is currently sitting on.

Active Time Segment - Will render all the frames in your current timeline (the default is 0 - 100)

Range - Lets you tell it which range of numbers you wish to render (65 - 145 etc.)

Frames - Lets you choose singles and ranges all at once, just like printing in word. (1, 3, 5-12 etc.)

Below the Time Output you will see the Output Size settings, a dropdown gives you your initial selection time like Custom, Standard, or HDTV video sizes.

Defaulted on Custom you can change these numbers either in the Width and Height Dialogue Fields:

Or by clicking one of the custom settings buttons to the right of the fields:

After setting the size of your output render, you will want to scroll further down to the Render Output settings.

In these settings you will find a Save File checkbox, which automatically marks itself upon telling 3DS where to save your files. To the right of the Save File checkbox is a Files... button.

Click it to open up the save file dialogue.

When this dialogue opens you will first look at the Save in: section, a dropdown that will allow you to navigate to different folders and places on your computer/network. Choose one here that you wish to save all your rendered images into.

Next, the Save as dropdown towards the bottom of your screen.

This lets you save any number of image file formats, remember that when saving an image file type, the program will save one file for each frame in your animation... so a 300 frame animation, means 300 images. JPEGs in the case pictured above.

Later you will string these files together with an editing program like Adobe Premiere or After Effects, etc.

After this you must remember to give your file a name.

Type the name in the empty dialogue field above the Save as Type dropdown.

When completely finished with those settings, hit the Save button.

Depending on your selection in the Save as Type: dropdown, a new settings box will open specific to the image type you chose. Make your final settings and say ok.

Finally, you can now hit the render button itself and watch your computer as it creates an images for every frame in your animation... each one rendered a new one begins until you have your final count (300 times in this particular example).

Top bar shows entire movie progress.

Bottom shows current frame progress.

When the top one is done, so is your computer. On to the next Render!!!!