form·Z RenderZone Plus is the version of form·Z that, in addition to all the modeling/drafting/animation tools found in the basic package (described here), includes photorealistic rendering based on the LightWorks® rendering engine. It offers three levels of rendering: simple, z-buffer, and raytrace. A user can start developing the image of a 3D model at the simple level and gradually turn on features and render it at the most photorealistic level.

form•Z RenderZone Plus also includes the ability to produce images based on global illumination techniques, which create renderings with the most realism, as the illumination of a scene takes into account the accurate distribution of light in the environment. In RenderZone Plus, global illumination includes final gather, ambient occlusion, and radiosity techniques, which can be applied separately or can be combined.

One or more lights can be used, which can be distant (sun), cone, point, projector, area, custom, line, environment, and atmospheric lights. Any of these lights may appear to glow in images and they are in addition to the globally available ambient light. The environment and atmospheric lights, which may be considered advanced light types, are especially optimized for global illumination.

Both soft (bit-mapped) and hard (raytraced) shadows are produced by the z-buffer and raytrace renderings.

Both procedural and pre-captured textures are offered and can be mapped onto the surfaces of objects using six different mapping methods: flat, cubic, cylindrical, spherical, parametric, or UV coordinates. A preview environment offers easy methods for both positioning and viewing textures as they are mapped onto objects.

Cubic and spherical environment mapping, bumps, backgrounds that include alpha channel support, depth effects, and post processing effects can be applied. Blur is an example of a post processing effect that simulates focusing your camera to a particular area of your modeling scene. Sky backgrounds that are procedurally generated come close to real skies that you may have captured with your camera.

Transparencies, reflections, and refractions can be applied at the z-buffer and raytrace levels. The reflections and refractions are always correctly raytraced, even when they are produced by the z-buffer rendering. This is achieved by applying a mixed rendering method, where surfaces with no reflections are rendered using z-buffer and the rendering effects of reflective surfaces are produced using raytracing.

State of the art shaders are used to render surfaces and other effects. A surface style is defined by up to four layers of shaders, which produce color, reflections, transparency, and bump effects. They can be applied independently or can be correlated. For example, the same procedural or pre-captured texture can be used for the color and then also as a transparency filter or bump mask. Surface styles can be assigned to complete objects or to groups of faces called texture groups.

Decals can be attached on top of other surface styles to produce a variety of rendering effects, such as labels on objects, graffiti on walls, partially reflective surfaces, masked transparencies, and more. Up to thirty-two decals can be applied to a single object and, because these decals may freely overlap, the rendering effects can be combined in virtually unlimited ways. Mixed wire frame and shaded renderings can be produced in the same image, in both form•Z and RenderZone Plus. The wire frames can even cast shadows.

Natural looking trees, which have been pre-captured, can be included in renderings with particular ease.

Libraries with many predefined materials are included and can be easily extended and customized by users. Images can be rendered and saved in a variety of user controlled sizes and resolutions, to a maximum of 16,000 x 16,000 pixels. Partially rendered images can also be produced and saved.

The Imager, a utility that is incorporated in the program and is also available independently, can be used to batch render sequences of images whose viewing and rendering parameters are previously set and saved.

Raytraced renderings can be accelerated by the use of multiple processors, which are supported by RenderZone Plus.

Lengthy renderings and animations can be accelerated by distributing the rendering tasks over a network or rendering clients, which are controlled by a dedicated server application. An unlimited number of clients can be assigned to any network rendering.

Also available is a sketch rendering mode that produces non photorealistic images, which appear as if they were drawn by manual rendering techniques, such as oil painting, water color, or pencil hatches.