Standard renderer

This is the default built-in rendering engine, which is also used by OVITO for the real-time display of the interactive viewports. It uses the graphics hardware (GPU) of your computer and generates images very quickly. The interactive viewports and rendered images show the scene with the same settings when the Standard renderer is selected for both uses on the Renderer tab of the rendering page.

The “More Options” (vertical ellipsis) button next to each numerical parameter opens a context menu with the option to reset each parameter to its default value.

Parameters

Ambient occlusion

Enables screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO), which darkens surfaces in crevices and in the vicinity of other objects. This improves the perception of shape and spatial arrangement, e.g., of densely packed atoms. The effect is computed in real time from the depth information of the rendered image. Since the screen-space method only knows the frontmost visible surfaces, it is an approximation: semi-transparent objects receive the occlusion of the surfaces behind them, and objects outside of the image do not cast any occlusion.

Radius: Radius of the neighborhood around a surface point within which other objects cast occlusion onto it, specified in simulation units of length. A value on the order of the particle diameter is usually a good choice.
Intensity: Strength of the darkening.

Shadows

Enables shadows cast by the directional light source, which make the spatial arrangement of objects easier to perceive. The direction of the light source is specified relative to the camera on the Effects tab of the rendering page, so that the shadows always fall onto visible surfaces. When the effect is enabled, surfaces are shaded according to their orientation relative to this light source. Semi-transparent objects receive shadows but do not cast any.

Intensity: Fraction of the direct light that is blocked in shadowed regions. At 100%, shadowed surfaces receive only ambient light.
Sharpness: Sharpness of the shadow edges. Lower values produce soft shadows with wider penumbrae; at 100%, the shadows have hard edges.

Transparency method

This option controls how the effect of two or more semi-transparent scene objects overlapping with each other should be computed by the renderer. Both available methods represent different approximations of how a true rendition of semi-transparent objects would look like - which is not achievable in real-time visualization using rasterization techniques.

Back-to-front ordered rendering (default) gives correct results if there is only one kind of semi-transparent object in the scene, e.g. just particles, but likely fails to render a mixture of different semi-transparent objects correctly, e.g. semi-transparent particles combined with semi-transparent surface meshes.

Weighted Blended Order-Independent Transparency is an alternative method more suitable for overlapping semi-transparent objects of different kinds. But it can deliver only a rough approximation of translucency.

Antialiasing level

To reduce aliasing effects, the output image is usually rendered at a higher resolution than the final image (supersampling). This factor controls how much larger this resolution is. A factor of 1 turns anti-aliasing off. Higher values lead to better quality. This setting only applies to rendered images; the interactive viewports do not use supersampling.

Depth of field

The depth of field effect, which is turned on and configured on the Effects tab of the rendering page, is approximated by the Standard renderer in perspective views: it blurs the rendered image according to the depth of each pixel. Thin line graphics (e.g. of measurements), text labels, and viewport layers stay sharp. Semi-transparent objects rendered with the weighted blended order-independent transparency method get blurred like the objects behind them.