Alias comes with a bunch of command line rendering tools, such as renderer, raytracer, powercaster, and powertracer. These programs allow your to render without Alias running in order to take advantage of all the horsepower you machine has to offer. These programs have been around for a long time and were a favorite of mine back in the Unix days. I would remotely log into machines that weren't being used in the studio and run my renderings on those machines.

So today I will walk you through this process. To start we need to save an SDL file out of Alias. This file stores all the rendering information from the Render Globals, Shaders, Lights, etc. needed to render the file.

Go to File -> Export -> SDL

Next we will need to open up a Command Window.

Go to Start -> Run -> type Cmd -> Enter

Once in the command window navigate to the appropriate project directory.

Next we use one of the following commands to render the sdl file I named test_01:
renderer - this renders a raycast image
raytracer - this renders a raytraced image
powercaster - this renders a raycast image on all available processors
powertracer - this renders a raytraced image on all available processors

Type the appropriate command: renderer sdl/test_01

This tells the computer to use the renderer program to raycast the file "test_01" in the sdl directory.

Once the file is rendered you can view the results by using the fcheck command.

Navigate to the pix directory

Type the following command: fcheck test_01.tif

You image will appear in a new window.

That is all there is too it. Not to bad. If you want to get even more indepth there are many options you can include in the rendering commands. You can view these command in the Alias Help docs under Command Line Options.

Created by Aaron... Your Alias CAD Geek!