# Render settings

This panel lets you set general parameters for rendering images and movies, e.g. output resolution, backround color, etc. It is found on the Render tab in the main window

## Parameters

Rendering range

  Selects the animation frames to be rendered. If you render a sequence of animation frames, you should also set an output movie file to let OVITO write the rendered animation to disk.

Every Nth frame

  This setting controls how many frames of the current animation are actually rendered. Set this to 1 to render every frame. A value of 2 will render only every other frame, etc. Thus, you can use this setting to reduce the number of output video frames for very long simulation sequences.

File number base

  When rendering an animation as a series of image files (rather than one video file), OVITO includes the frame number in the output filename. This parameter lets you choose another base file number, i.e. an offset. This can be useful if you want to collect the video frames from several animation sequences in one directory, which will later be combined into a single movie using an external video encoding program.

Output image size

  Specifies the width and height of the rendered image or movie in pixels.

Save to file

  Activate this option to write the generated image or movie to a file. Otherwise the rendered image is only displayed in the frame buffer window without saving it. After clicking the Choose... button to pick an output file name this option will be checked automatically.

  When rendering an animation sequence, all frames are written to a single movie file if you select a movie format (e.g. AVI). If you choose an image format instead (e.g. PNG), OVITO writes a sequence of image files and appends the frame number to the selected filename.

Background

  You can choose between a uniform background color and a transparent background. If set to transparent, OVITO will make those areas of the output image transparent that are not covered by any object. This is useful if you intend to put the image in front of some other background later, for instance on a presentation slide. Note that transparency information (alpha channel) must be supported by the image file format for this to work (best choice is PNG format).

Switch renderer

  Use this to select a different rendering engine. OVITO provides two rendering back-ends, which differ in terms of quality and rendering speed. By default the hardware-accelerated OpenGL renderer is active, which is the same rendering engine used in the interactive viewports. The Tachyon renderer, in contrast, is a software-based raytracing engine that offers better shading algorithms, but which is slower.

To start the rendering process, click the Render Active Viewport button.