General

• Ground Plane Reflections in Hardware Shade display a band at the bottom of the display.

  Workaround: Disable the Status Bar in General Preferences and maximize the perspective window, or disable the Status Bar and move the perspective window to the bottom left corner of the display.

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  Arrows inside Multi-lister color swatches are blue instead of white on Mac OS.

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  Setting the Number of Processors to a number greater than the total number of CPU's or Cores will fail to render.

  Workaround: Set the processors to a number that is less or equal to the available number of CPU's or set to All.

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  When rendering with stages, the stages’s background source setting is not respected by software rendering for IBL. (The background is respected for hardware shading.)

  Workaround: Only map the desired IBL map. Delete any other IBL maps from the other files.

• QTVR is currently not supported on the 64-bit versions of Alias. The following message appears when you try to use QTVR on a 64-bit version of Alias:

  Warning: QTVR is currently not supported for Windows 64-bit applications.

• Animated textures that are referenced as a series of images are not stored in the wirefile if the Embedded flag is enabled in the File > Save As options.

Hardware Shade and Diagnostic Shading

• Triplanar projection does not support the Wrap feature. If Wrap is applied, the projection doesn’t display as expected.
• Depending on the video card you have installed, the Line Smooth slider may have no effect on the actual thickness of the line. Some cards do not support this feature.
• When forcing Anti-Aliasing in the Driver Control panel, marking menu performance is slow.

  Disable the graphics card-based Anti-Aliasing and use the software-based Anti-Aliasing from within Alias.

• Diagnostic shading is lost for deformed objects with lattice rig, transformer rig.

  When using the lattice rig and transformer rig tools ( Object Edit > Dynamic Shape Modeling > Transformer Rig , Object Edit > Dynamic Shape Modeling > Lattice Rig ), any objects you request to be deformed will lose their diagnostic shading.

  The software creates new surfaces for these objects. Whenever a tool creates new surfaces, these surfaces do not display diagnostic shading

  Workaround: Click on diagnostic shading in the Control Panel to reapply it to the objects.

• The ObjectDisplay > Diagnostic Shading window appears empty when the Control Panel is displayed (or displayed and then turned off).

  Display (or display and then hide) the modeling control panel. For example, choose Windows > Control Panel , then click the Paint button at the top of the Paint Control Panel and choose Modeling. Then choose Windows > Control Panel to hide the modeling control panel.

• Transparent objects do not cast or receive self shadows.
• Hardware rendering can display the Environment Shader background texture only if a 2D texture is used. Solid texture environment textures will appear in the background only in software renderings.
• Self Shadows and Ground Plane Shadows do not currently support displacement maps. Objects with displacement maps will cast shadows based on the original geometry as if no displacement maps were enabled.
• Layered shaders that contain a layer that has a transparency map will not display correctly with self shadows on.
• When Optimize during Tumble is enabled for Self Shadows (in Hardware Shade settings), any mouse or keyboard input will interrupt the current shadow calculation or shadow rendering. When self shadow rendering is interrupted, parts of the half rendered scene will be momentarily displayed and will appear with most objects unlit and in shadow.
• Shading maps are interpreted differently when used with self shadows enabled.

  Shading maps will have to be adjusted separately to get the desired appearance when self shadows are enabled.

• Duplicate objects that occupy the same location in space will appear brighter when self shadows are on.
• With Shading method set to Per vertex, when Self Shadows and Show Background are enabled, blending may be incorrect for some scenes and reflections can appear stronger with self shadows enabled.

  Switching the Shading method to Per pixel removes this limitation.

• For self shadows, when the camera goes into shadow, the shadow that you are in will no longer be rendered and will disappear.
• Setting Minimum Edge Length values in Diagnostic Shade or Hardware Shade can consume large amounts of memory. Software crashes can be associated with setting too small a value.

Meshes

• UV maps that are applied to mesh data will become corrupt if any of the mesh modification tools are used on the mesh. There is no workaround.

Multi-lister

• Acube map is retrieved as an image map, when only the cube map (not the shader itself) is selected and saved out.

  Save out the entire shader. The cube map is preserved.

• The ? icon in the Multi-lister that indicates a missing file texture may still appear even after you have updated the file texture path and name.

Image planes

• Canvas planes will not cast reflections onto objects if there is another (even blank) canvas plane in between the object and the camera.
• Image planes (but not canvas planes) do not correctly fit to view when dollying out in an Orthographic Perspective view.

  Solution: Click on the “Previous View” button (black back arrow) in the View Panel to restore the correct image plane position.

Render and Direct Render

• The command line batch renderers fail to render embedded file textures.

  If you want to export an SDL file for rendering at a later time or on another machine, you must extract the textures beforehand using File > Image References > Extract Image References so that any image file textures embedded in the wire file will be available to the renderer.

• A problem has been found when Alias opens a SDL file with Embed image references turned ON (where the texture used for the shader color is an embedded image file).

  The results of rendering the SDL (using the command line interface) shows the file reference image with a red question mark.

  If you want to export a SDL file for rendering at a later time or on another machine, you must choose File > Image References > Extract Image References before exporting. As a result, any image file textures embedded in the wire file will be available to the renderer.

• A problem as been found in the hardware render when using Ambient Occlusion (Render > Ambient Occlusion > Compute ). It is not displayed on transparent surfaces while in Hardware Shade. The Ambient Occlusion effect is not visible on transparent objects although this will display in the software renderer.
• SDL files created from Animation > Tools > Autofly or Animation > Turntable do not contain geometry and will not render.