• Color and Alpha — Color output with alpha channel for background (24 bit color + 8 bit alpha), also referred to as RGBA. This is a 32 bit image. After the rendering is completed, you add any image or color for background, provided the environment is not "visible to camera."
• Ambient Occlusion — Shades the model in such a way as to accentuate its nooks and crannies. Ambient Occlusion means what areas of your model are hidden from ambient light in the scene. In other words, which portions of your model are shadowed. Ambient Occlusion is also a predefined render setup. You can get the ambient occlusion render setup by clicking the down arrow on the Render Setup Manager icon and selecting Ambient Occlusion from the drop-down menu. Then clicking Render icon in the Luxology Render dialog, renders the model with the Ambient Occlusion render output. Setting the Output to Ambient Occlusion is equivalent to using all white diffuse surfaces lit by a white environment. For example, if half the rays coming from the point being shaded hit geometry, then the point is half occluded and will be 50% grey. If all the rays hit geometry, then the point will be black. If no rays hit the geometry, then the point will be 100% white. The resulting baked map then can be used as a diffuse texture layer with the blend mode set to multiply. This is a very common technique used in film production to optimize certain elements in a shot so that full global illumination solving is not required on a frame by frame basis. This is a very good technique also for quickly dirtying up your model as it tends to darken areas that would generally collect dust and dirt in the real world. Ambient Occlusion uses Global Illumination to perform the rendering. The quality of the Ambient Occlusion pass is dependent on the number of Occlusion Rays used. The default value of 64 may result in grainy images. You can improve quality, (at the expense of render time) by increasing the number of Occlusion Rays to 256 or more.
  
  
  

  Example of ambient occlusion

• Depth — Produces grayscale images where the values are based on the distance from the back-clipping plane or, if one is not defined, the back of the geometry visible in the scene. Lighting has no effect when using Depth output. This option can be used, for example, to create a displacement map from existing geometry. Where required, you can use a selection set to include multiple elements in the displacement map. The depth output image also can be used with 3rd party image editors to quickly produce high quality Depth of Field effects by using lens blurring filters. By default, a Top view is used for the image. Where an Auxiliary Coordinate System (ACS) is active and ACS Plane lock is on, the Top view for the ACS is used. If ACS Plane lock is off, then the standard Top view is used.
• Shadow Density — The Shadow Density rendering output renders a channel generated from the density of all direct light shadows in Luxology, exclusive of color shading or texture. The darkest areas of shadow render as white ramping toward black for the areas that would be fully illuminated. When rendering in layers, it is very useful to have shadows rendered separately giving one control of color and transparency. You could easily invert this channel in an image editing application and layer it over the unshadowed render set to multiply, giving control over how dark the shadows are based on the layers transparency.
• Color Only — Output is rendered with the defined colors and materials. This is a color output only and does not have an alpha channel (24 bit color).
• Alpha — Output is rendered with alpha channel only (8 bit grayscale).
• Reflection Shading — The Reflection Shading output generates a channel of all the reflections calculated within a scene, independent of all other attributes.
• Specular Shading — The Specular Shading output generates a channel of all the specular shadings within a scene, independent of all other attributes.
• Subsurface Shading — The Subsurface Shading output generates a channel of all the subsurface scattering shadings within a scene, independent of all other attributes.
• Transparent Shading — The Transparent Shading output generates a channel of all the transparent shadings within a scene, independent of all other attributes.
• Illumination Total — The Illumination Total output generates a channel of the full illumination in a scene, including shadows cast by direct sources, independent of all other surfacing attributes.
• Illumination Indirect — The Illumination Indirect output generates a channel exclusive to the illumination in a scene from all indirect sources such as image based lighting and luminous polygons, independent of all other surfacing attributes.
• Illumination Direct — The Illumination Direct output generates a channel exclusive to the illumination in a scene from all direct light items such as distant lights, area lights, point lights and spot lights, independent of all other surfacing attributes.

• Per Light — Shadow type is that as defined by each light.
• Sharp — 1 sample.
• Soft-Coarse — 16 samples.
• Soft-Medium — 64 samples.
• Soft-Fine — 160 samples.
• Soft-Very Fine — 256 samples.

The Stereo Image Type setting on the Luxology Render dialog also allows you to switch between displaying a side-by-side stereo pair or an anaglyph display. The setting is only available if Stereo is on in the Render Setup Manager dialog.

When Depth of Field is enabled, the f-Stop field is enabled also. In this field, you can key in, or select from a drop-down menu, the f-Stop for the camera lens (lens aperture) to simulate the depth of field of a camera.

Depth of field refers to the range of distances that an image is in focus for a given lens aperture. Objects beyond that range typically will appear somewhat out of focus — the further outside the range, the more out of focus. When an image is rendered with Luxology and the Depth of Field check box is on, changes in focus will be rendered.

Associated with this setting is the Focal Distance setting for the Camera Position settings in the Define Camera tool.

• From View - Sets the projection mode from the view selected for performing the render. The projection mode in this case will be either Perspective or Orthographic.
• Spherical - Renders (equirectangular) spherical images that can be viewed as a panorama using FSPViewer or to save the resulting render as an image file (.HDR or .EXR) and used as a HDRI (high dynamic range imaging) environment.
• Cylindrical - Captures the entire view from the perspective of a tube, removing the polar areas of the projection.
• Spherical VR and Cylindrical VR - Used for virtual reality applications such as a Google Cardboard and Samsung Gear.

Crease Threshold is used for rendering contours with luxology. When the angle between triangles in a mesh is lower than the angle specified, then a line is drawn along that boundary.

You can select a predefined setting, or you can create a custom setting.

The predefined quality options are presented in a list box and they change the number of samples used by Luxology for antialiasing.

• None — 1 sample.
• Low — 4 samples.
• Medium — 8 samples.
• High — 16 samples.
• Very High — 64 samples.
• Custom — User defined (1–1024 samples).

• Box — Each pixel is affected only by the samples within its borders, and each sample is weighted equally. This is sharp but rather artificial. For example, imagine two pixels side by side, and a sample very close to the border between them. That sample will contribute 100% of its color to whichever pixel it lies in (even if it's only inside that pixel by a tiny margin) and 0% to the other pixel.
• Triangle — Each pixel is affected by all the samples within it and also samples up to halfway across all the neighboring pixels. Samples are weighted with a linear falloff based on their distances from the center of the pixel. Sometimes, this is called a Tent or Bartlett filter and is equivalent to the "enhanced antialiasing" added to LightWave in 1996 for use in Titanic. In this case, a sample in the middle of the border between two pixels would contribute roughly equally to both pixels.
• Gaussian — (The default) Performs a more accurate sample. This generally yields the best results although it may be slightly slower than the Box or Triangle options. Each pixel is affected by samples that might be all the way across the neighboring pixels (within a radius of 1.5 pixels of its center), and samples are weighted with a bell curve.
• Catmull-Rom — This filter generally yields slightly sharper results than Gaussian.
• Mitchell-Netravali — This filter offers good results when dealing with problematic moire created by fine texture patterns.